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103 



I 



HISTORY OF ART 
ANCIENT ART 



X 



ELIE FAURE 



HISTORY OF ART 



ANCIENT ART 



Translated from the French by 
WALTER PACK 



Illustrated from Photographs 
Selected by the Author 




HARPER 0- BEOTHERS PUBLISHERS 

NEW YORK AND LONDON 
MCMXXI 



292456 



History of Art — Ancient A «it 






*•• ; *. '. I {tîb^ynght, 1921, bi* Haiper & Brother» 



Printed in the United States of America 

L-V 



To My Wife 



Pompeian mosaic {Atiueiim of Naples), 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 

Tranbiatoii'b Pbbtack ii 

Intboduition to the FiRBT French Edition (1908) . . . ivii 

Preface to the New Editiom (IOSO) xxxr 

I. Before Histort 3 

II. EOTPT 81 

III. The Ancient Orient 78 

IV. The Sources of Greek Art 118 

V, Phidias 149 

Yl. The Dose of Mankind 187 

\1I, Intoutb Greece 299 

VIII. Rome «OS 

Alpbareticai. Index 305 

Stwoftic Tahu» 307 

SioNS AND Abbreviations 309 



TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE 

A RT history is, in its essentials, the history of 
ZJk man, for no one can write the story of art in 
-A- ^ more than a superficial way without following 
out the relation of each school to the ideas of its period 
and its people. But it is even more than that : it is the 
history of the development of man as revealed by his 
art. Elie Faure, in the present history, pursues this 
idea with a fidelity and an understanding that it has 
never received till now. Indeed, one may almost 
say that such a work aS this could not have been 
written earlier, for it has been only gradually that 
we have come to understand the relation of art to the 
character and surroundings of the races it represents. 
Various works on isolated artists and schools have 
dealt with their subject from this standpoint, but 
there existed no survey of the world's art as a whole 
until the four volumes of this series were written. 

The professional, whether critic, teacher, or artist, 
will find in these pages the fullest application of the 
modem theory of history (for the governing idea here 
is one that goes beyond the limits of art history), while 
the layman will follow the epic of man's development 
in company with a passionate lover of beauty who 
has the gift of commimicating his enthusiasm. It is 
a fallacy to believe that a book for the general reader 



X TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE 

sbould dilute the ideas of works addressed to spe- 
cialists. The contrary is true: to meet the needs of 
persons bf diverse interests, more intensity of idea 
is required, more breadth of scope, than is demanded 
of a treatise for specialists, whose .concern with their 
subject will cause them to overlook dryness and 
diffuseness if a valuable theory is established or new 
facts are arrived at. 

For a comparison of the older and the newer views 
of art history, the reader can scarcely be referred to 
anything clearer than M. Faure's own discussion in 
the preface to the new edition of this work (page xxxv). 
His brief reference there to the synoptic tables at the 
back of each volume may be supplemented by the 
assurances received from various close students <^ 
the special schools and epochs, who agree in vouching 
for the thoroughness with which this most objective com- 
pilation of names and dates has been made. A refer- 
ence chart is thus constantly before the reader, serving 
him as a road map does a traveler. The text of most 
art histories does little more than amplify such tables. 
The characteristic which distinguishes Elie Faure's 
History of Art is that it shows the mass of facts func- 
tionally — as the living brain and heart of mankind. 

The loyalty with which, in the preface mentioned, 

M. Faure defends the work of the archseologist is 

due in part to his appreciation of the material that 

the searchers for detail have placed at his disposal, 

ibtless in part also to the fact that he himself 

the labor of obtaining the first-hand informa- 

i which the history and interpretation of art 



TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE xi 

are built. At no one place, however (and one need 
not fear to lay too much stress on this point), does 
he fall into the error of imagining that an assembling 
of facts is history. Even when writing of arts like 
the Egyptian and the Greek, as to which his study 
on the historic sites has given him a special authority, 
even when treating of the Gothic period, as to which 
his knowledge is so profound as to make Mr. Have- 
lock Ellis apply the word "unsurpassable" to the 
chapters of this history on Gothic art — ^his modem 
understanding of his task causes him to refer con- 
stantly to the philosophy, social life, and ideals of 
the people under examination, and not to their art 
atone. He goes farther, and by a series of dramatic 
confrontations makes us realize the differences among 
the arts and their debt to one another. Thus, in the 
pages on the Gothic he has before his eyes the color 
of Mohanmiedan art which was of such importance 
to western Europe when its returning crusaders brought 
back to the glassmakers of the cathedrals their mem- 
ories of the Orient. Yet M. Faure's main guide in 
this part of his study is the life of the mediaeval com- 
mune; he shows its relation to the appearance or 
nonappearance of great cathedrals in the French cities 
and its use as a basis for an explanation of the differ- 
ence between English and French Gothic. We are 
thus relieved in very large measure from the tyranny 
of taste and of arbitrary assertion that plays so large 
a part in most art writing. 

In the present volume, again, the rise and decline 
of Greek art are not treated as matters that have 



xii TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE 

been permanently decided by experts; neither does the 
author justify his statements in terms of aesthetics 
to be followed only by those persons who have had a 
special experience in the arts. The sources of Greek 
art are studied with a view of allowing anyone inter- 
ested in the subject to see the reason for the "focus" 
that would' be produced when the elements of the 
light were fused, the golden period is considered with 
relation to the ideas of philosophy and liberty which 
had so great an effect on the arts, and as Greece turns 
to the Dusk of Mankind (with which variant of Wag- 
ner's word " Gotterdammerung " M. Faure entitles 
his chapter on the decline), we are again shown, in 
the ideas at work in the race, the reasons for the new 
phases of its art — and not simply told that one statue 
is later or worse than another, or involved in technical 
intricacies from which we only escape with the classic 
"de gustibus.*^ 

A feature of the history, which, the English reader 
will recognize with the four volumes before him, is the 
scoi>e of the work. It is one of the proofs of its right 
to represent the modern idea of art. Beginning with 
the accessions to our knowledge a century ago, when 
important Greek works came to northern Europe, 
we have for a hundred years been extending the 
boundaries of the art considered classic. The mas- 
terpieces of Japan, China, and India have been reach- 
ing us only since the middle of the nineteenth century. 
The last of the exotic arts to affect Europeans has 
been that of the African sculptors. No other history 
approaches that of M. Faure in its full and clear 



TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE xiii 

study of the contribution of these more lately recog- 
nized arts to the widening of our horizon and to the 
changes in our understanding which they have caused. 

It is not alone that the art of the last half centuty 
is different from that of earUer times because it is 
built on a wider base, but that to-day we see the whole 
of the past with new eyes. As our thought evolves 
there will unquestionably be further changes in our 
estimate of the past, but the summary resulting from 
the present work may confidently be expected to hold its 
rank as an important one in the history of the subject. 
For we have here the ideas of a period of intense 
research and criticism, and a point in that period 
when our thought has attained at least a temporary 
tranquillity through its grasp of the new elements at 
its command and through an outlook on art that 
represents the creative men of the epoch. 

It is to be doubted whether later critics will differ, 
to a radical d^ree, from the judgment of the Renais- 
sance to which M. Faure points in his volume on that 
period, for the great critical activity of the last half 
century has been specially occupied with the Renais- 
sance, and M. Faure knows well the results of this 
study. Perhaps it will be around the volume on 
Modem Art that later discussion will mainly center, 
for here the currents of interpretation sometimes 
issue from conflicting sources. M. Faure's analysis, 
however, must have a permanent interest, for it is 
based on too deep an understanding of the political 
and social structure of the European countries ever 
to be entirely superseded. It is the philosophy of a 



xiv TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE 

man whose role în the drama of his time is em'iched 
by the great breadth of his activities and who has 
drawn on them all in his writing on art— the central 
interest of his. career. 

Elie Faure is a physician, and the scientist's 
knowledge and point of view is to be traced in his 
History of Art as well as in his masterly essay on 
Lamarck. He is one of the founders of the Université 
Populaire and one of its lecturers. The thought on 
social questions which informs those books by M. 
Faure that treat of economic and racial evolution, 
of ethics and of war, recurs when he writes of art, or 
rather he looks on all of these things as inextricably 
mingled. 

As we reach his pages on the later nineteenth cen- 
tury and the twentieth (for the last volume carries 
us to the art produced since the war), we find the 
author giving not only the original judgments that 
characterize his history from its beginning, but trans- 
mitting to us the ideas of the artists themselves, for 
as a result of his personal acquaintance with many 
of the chief workers of his time, he is enabled to s{>eak 
not only of them but for them. 

And yet the tone of these pages is but little different 
from that of the remainder of the work; the arts of 
the past have been so alive for the writer that his 
words seem to come most often from one who had 
seen the work produced. While searching untiringly 
for the facts of history and presenting their essentials 
in the order and relationship that the most modem 
scholarship has made available, the idea behind the 



TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE xv 

whole work must (as M. Faure himself explains in the 
preface to the new edition before cited) be tinged with 
the personality of the writer and by the character of 
his time. "The historian who calls himself a scientist 
simply utters a piece of folly/' In these* matters 
judgment is inevitable, for to write the history of art 
one must make one's decisions as to what it is. The 
writing of it is in itself a work of art — as the style of 
Elie Faure is there to prove. Only one who feels the 
emotions of art can tell others which are the great 
works and make clear the collective poem formed by 
their history. It is precisely because EUe Faure is 
adding something to that poem that he has the right 
to tell us of its meaning. 

Walter Pack. 



INTRODUCTION TO THE FIRST 
FRENCH EDITION (1909) 

ART, which expresses life,' is as mysterious as life. 
I \ It escapes all formulas, as life does. But the 
■*- ■^ need of defining it pursues us, because it enters 
everj" hour of our existence, aggrandizing the aspects 
of that existence by its more elevated forms or dis- 
honoring them by its lower forms. No matter how 
distasteful it is for us to make the effort to hear and 
to observe, it is impossible for us not to hear and to 
see, it is impossible for us to refrain wholly from form- 
ing some kind of opinion of the world of appearances 
— the meaning of which it is precisely the mission of 
art to reveal to us. Historians, moralists, biologists, 
and metaphysicians — all those who demand of life 
the secret of its origins and its purposes — are sooner 
or later compelled to ask why we recognize ourselves 



xviii INTRODUCTION 

in the works which manifest life. But the too restricted 
limits of biology, of metaphysics, of morality, and of 
history compel us to narrow the field of our vision 
when we enter the moving immensity of the poem 
that man sings, forgets, and has begun again to sing 
and to forget ever since he has been man. It matters 
not which of these studies has interested us, the feeling 
for beauty will be found to be identical in all of them. 
And without doubt it is this feeling that dominates 
them and draws them on to that possible unity which 
is the goal of human activity and which alone makes 
that activity real. 

It is only by Ustening to the heart that one can 
speak of art without belittling it. We are all, in some 
measure, partakers of the truth, but we cannot know 
truth itself, unless we desire passionately to seek it 
out and, having found it, feel the enthusiasm to pro- 
claim it widely. Only he who permits the divine 
voices to sing within him knows how to respect the 
mystery of the work which inspired him to induce 
other men to share in his emotion. Michelet did not 
betray the Gothic workmen or Michael Angelo, 
because he himself was consumed by the passion 
which uplifts the nave of the cathedrals and that 
other passion which unchains its storm in the vaults 
of the Sistine. Baudelaire was a great poet because 
he penetrated to the central hearth from which the 
spirit of the heroes radiates in force and in light. 
Moreover, if the ideas of Taine did not die with him, 
it is because his artist's nature is greater than his will 
and because his dogmatic stiffness is continually over- 



INTRODUCTION xix 

flowed by the incessantly renewed wave of sensations 
and of images. 

Taine came at the hour when we learned that our own 
destiny was bound up with the acts of those who have 
preceded us on life's road and even with the very 
structure of the earth from which we spring. He 
was, therefore, in a position to see the form of our 
thought issue from the mold of history. "Art sums up 
life." It enters us with the strength of our soil, the 
color of our sky, through the atavistic preparation 
which determines it, as well as through the passions 
and the will of men — which it defines. For the expres- 
sion of our ideas, we employ the materials which oiu* 
eyes can see and our hands touch. It is impossible 
that Phidias, the sculptor who lived in the South, in 
a clearly defined world, and Rembrandt, the painter 
who lived in the mist of the North, amid a floating 
world — two men separated by twenty centuries during 
which humanity lived, suffered, and aged — should 
use the same words. Only, it is necessary that we 
should recognize ourselves in Rembrandt as well as 
in Phidias. 

Not until we have expressed in some sort of language 
the appearance of the things about us do these things 
exist for us and retain their appearance. If art were 
nothing more than a reflection of societies, which pass 
like shadows of clouds upon the earth, we should ask 
no more of art than that it teach us history. But it 
recounts man to us, and, through him, the universe. 
It goes beyond the moment, it lengthens the duration 
of time, it widens th^ comprehension of man, and ex- 



XX INTRODUCTION 

tends the life and lîmît of the universe. It fixes moving 
eternity in its momentary form. 

In recounting man to us, art teaches us to know 
and understand ourselves. The strange thing is that 
there should be any need for art to do this. Tol- 
stoi's book ^ meant nothing else. He came at a pain- 
ful moment when, strongly fortified by the results 
of our research work, but bewildered bv the horizons 
which it opened, we perceived that our effort was 
becoming diffused, and sought to compare the results 
attained in order to unite in a common faith and 
march forward. We think and believe what we need 
to think and to believe, and it is this which gives to 
our thoughts and beliefs, throughout our historj-, 
that indestructible foundation of humanity which 
they all have. Tolstoi said what it was necessary to 
say at the moment when he said it. 

Art is the appeal to the instinct of communion in 
men. We recognize one another by the echoes it 
awakens in us, which we transmit to others by our 
enthusiasm, and which resound in the deeds of men 
throughout all generations, even when those genera- 
tions may not suspect it. If, during the hours of 
depression and lack of comprehension only a few of 
us hear the call, it is that in those hours we alone 
possess the idealistic energy which later is to reanimate 
the heroism asleep in the multitudes. It has been 
said that the artist is sufficient unto himself. That 
is not true. The artist who says so is infected with 
an evil pride. The artist who believes it is not an 

* Tolstoi. What is Art f 



INTRODUCTION xxi 

artist. If he had not needed the most universal of 
our languages, the artist would not have created it. 
He would dig the ground to get his bread on a desert 
island. No one has more need of the presence and 
approbation of men. He speaks because he feels 
their presence around him, and lives in the hope — 
sometimes despaired of but never relinquished — that 
they will come at last to understand him. It is his 
function to pour out his being, to give as much as he 
can of his life, to demand of others that they also 
give him as much as they can of themselves, to realize 
with them — in an obscure and magnificent collabora- 
tion — a harmony all the more impressive that a greater 
number of lives have participated in it. The artist, 
to whom men give everj'thing, returns in full measure 
what he has taken from them. 

Nothing touches us except what happens to us or 
what can happen to us. The artist is ourselves. He 
has behind him the same depths of humanity, whether 
enthusiastic or depressed; he has about him the same 
secret nature, which each of his steps broadens. The 
artist is the crowd, to which we all belong, which 
defines us all, with our consent or despite our resistance. 
He has not the power to gather up the stones of the 
house which he builds us (at the risk of crushing in 
his breast and of tearing his hands), on any road save 
that on which we travel at his side. He must suffer 
from that which makes our suffering, and we must make 
him suffer. He must feel our joys and he must derive 
them from us. It is necessary that he live our griefs 
and our inner victories, even when we do not feel them. 



xxîi INTRODUCTION 

The artist can feel and dominate his surroundings 
only when he considers them as a means of creation. 
Only then does he give us those permanent realities 
which all acts and all moments reveal to those who 
know how to see and how to live. These realities 
survive the changes in human society as the mass of 
the sea survives the agitations of its surface. Art is 
always a "system of relations," Mid a synthetic sys- 
tem. This is true even of primitive art, which shows 
the passionate pursuit of an essential sentiment, 
despite its indefatigable accumulation of detail. Every 
image symbolizes in brief the idea which the artist 
creates for himself of the unlimited world of sensa- 
tions and forms. Every image is an expression of his 
desire to bring about in this world the reign of that 
order which he knows how to discover m it. Art has 
been, since its most humble origins, the realization of 
the presentiments of certain men — who answer the 
needs of all men. Art has forced the world to yield 
to it the laws which have permitted us to establish 
progressively the sovereignty of our mind over the 
world. Emanating from humanity, art has revealed 
to humanity its own intelligence. Art has defined 
the races; alone it bears the testimony of their dra- 
matic effort. If we want to know what we are, we 
must understand what art is. 

Art initiates us into certain profound realities whose 
actual possession would enable humanity to bring 
about, within and around, itself the supreme harmony 
which is the fugitive goal of its endeavor; we do not 
desire such possession, however, as its effect would 



INTRODUCTION xxiii 

be to kill movement and thereby kill hope. Art is 
surely something infinitely greater than it is imagined 
to be by those who do not understand it. Perhaps 
also it is more practical than is thought by many of 
those who feel the force of its action. Bom of the 
association of our sensibihty and our experience, 
formed in order that we may be the masters of our- 
selves, it has, at all events, nothing of that disinter- 
ested aloofness to which Kant, Spencer, and Guyau 
himself attempted to limit to its sphere. All the 
images in the world are useful instruments for us, 
and the work of art attracts us only because we rec- 
ognize in it the formulation of our desire. 

We admit freely that objects of primary utility — 
our clothing, our furniture, our vehicles, our roads, 
our houses — seem to us beautiful when they serve 
their purpose adequately. But we stoutly persist in 
placing above — that is, outside of Nature, the supe- 
rior organisms in which she proclaims herself — our 
bodies, our faces, our thoughts, the infinite world of 
ideas, of passions, and of the landscapes in which these 
organisms Uve,and by which they are mutually defined — 
so that we are unable to separate them. Guyau did 
not go far enough when he asked himself if the most 
useful gesture were not the most beautiful, and with 
him we recoil from the decisive word as if it would 
stifle our dream. Yet we know our dream to be imper- 
ishable, since we shall never attain that realization 
of ourselves which we pursue unceasingly. Let me 
quote a sentence uttered by him among all men whose 
intelligence was freest, perhaps, from any material 



xxîv INTROI>ÛCTION 

limitation: "Is it not the function of a beautiful 
body," saîd Plato, "is it not its utility which demon- 
strates to us that it is beautiful? And everything 
which we find beautiful — faces, colors, sounds, pro- 
fessions — are not all these beautiful in the measure 
that we find them useful?** 

Let our idealism be reassured! It is only by a long 
accumulation of emotion and of will that man reaches 
the point on life's road where he can recognize the 
forms which are useful to him. It is this choice alone, 
made by certain minds, which will determine fpr the 
future, in the instincts of multitudes, what is destined 
to pass from the domain of sp>eculation into the domain 
of practice. It is our general development, it is the 
painful but constant purification of our intelligence 
and of our desire, which create and render necessary 
certain forms of civilization — which positive minds 
translate into the direct and easy satisfaction of all 
their material needs. What is most useful to man is 
the idea. 

The beautiful form, whether it be a tree or a river, 
the breasts of a woman or her sides, the shoulders or 
arms of a man, or the cranium of a god — the beautiful 
form is the form that adapts itself to its function. 
The idea has no other role than that of defining the 
form for us. The idea is the lofty outlook and the 
infinite extension in the world and in the future of the 
most imperious of our instincts. It sums up and 
proclaims this instinct as the flower and the fruit sum 
up the plant, prolong it and perpetuate it. Every 
being, even the lowest, contains within himself, at 



INTRODUCTION xxv 

least once in his earthly adventure — when he loves — 
all the poetry of the world. And he whom we call 
the artist is the one among living beings who, in the 
presence of miiversal life, maintains «the state of love 
in his heart. 

The obscure and formidable voice which reveals to 
man and to woman the beauty of woman and man, 
and impels them to make a decisive choice so that 
they may perpetuate and perfect their species, never 
ceases to resound in the artist, strengthened and 
multiplied by all the voices and the murmurs and the 
sounds and the tremblings which accompany it. That 
voice — ^he is forever hearing it, every time that the 
grasses move, every time that a violent or graceful 
form proclaims its life along his pathway. He hears 
it as he follows, from the roots to the leaves, the rise 
of the sap from under the earth to the trunks and the 
branches of the trees, every time that he looks at the sea 
rising and falling as if to respond to the tide of billions 
of life-cells that roll in it, every time that the fructi- 
fying force of heat and rain overwhelms him, every 
time that the generating winds repeat to him that 
human hymns are made up of the calls to voluptu- 
ousness and hope with which the world is filled. He 
seeks out the forms which he foresees, as a man or an 
animal in the grip of love seeks them. His desire 
passes from one form to another, he compares them 
pitilessly, and from his comparisons there springs 
forth, one day, the superior form, the idea whose 
recollection will weigh on his heart so long as he has 
not imparted his own life to it. He suffers until 



xxvi INTRODUCTION 

death, because each time that he has made a form 
fruitful, brought an idea to light, the image of another 
is bom in him, and because his hope, never wearied of 
reaching out for what he desires, can only be bom of 
the despair at not having attained his desire. He 
suffers; his tyrannical disquietude often makes those 
around him suffer. But around him, and fifty cen- 
turies after him, he consoles millions of men. The 
work he will leave behind him will assure an increase 
of power to those who can understand the logic and the 
certitude of his images. In listening to him, men will 
enjoy the illusion which he enjoyed for a moment — 
the illusion, often formidable but always ennobling, 
of absolute adaptation. 

^ It is the only divine illusion! We give the name of 
a god to the form which best interprets our desire — 
sensual, moral, individual, social, no .matter what, — 
our vague desire to comprehend, to utilize life, cease- 
lessly to extend the limits of the intelligence and the 
heart. With this desire we invade the lines, the pro- 
jections, and the volumes which proclaim this form 
to us, and it is in the meeting with the powerful forces 
that circulate within the form that the god reveals 
himself to us. From the impact of the spirit that 
animates the form with the spirit that animates us, 
life springs forth. We shall never be able to utilize 
it unless it responds wholly to those obscure move- 
ments which dictate our own actions. Rodin sees 
quivering in the block of marble a man and a woman 
knotted together by their arms and their legs, but 
we shall never understand the tragic necessity for 



INTRODUCTION xxvii 

such an embrace if we do not feel that an inner force, 
desire, mingles the hearts and the flesh of the bodies 
thus welded together. When Carrière wrests from 
the matter of the universe a mother giving the breast 
to her child, we shall not understand the value of that 
union if we do not feel that an inner force, love, dic- 
tates the bending of the torso and the curve of the 
mother's arm, and that another inner force, hunger, 
buries the infant in her bosom. The image that 
expresses nothing is not beautiful, and the finest senti- 
ment escapes us if it does not directly determine the 
image which shall translate it. The pediments, 
frescoes, and epics, the symphonies, the loftiest archi- 
tectures, all the sweep of liberty, the glory and the 
irresistible power of the infinite and living temple 
which we erect to ourselves, are in this mysterious 
accord. 

In every case, it is this agreement which defines all 
the higher forms of the testimonies to confidence and 
faith which we have left on our long road. It defines 
all our idealistic effort, which no finalism — in the 
"radical" ^ sense which the philosophers are giving 
to the world — has directed. Our idealism is no other 
thing than the reality of our mind. The necessity 
of adaptation creates it and maintains it in us, that 
it may be increased and transmitted to our children. 
It exists as a possibility at the foundation of our 
original moral life, as the physical man is contained 
in the distant protozoan. Our research for the abso- 
lute is the indefatigable desire for the repose that 

^ H. Bergson. Creative EvoltUion, 



xxviîî INTRODUCTION 

would result from our decisive triumph over the group 
of blind forces which oppose our progress. But, for 
our salvation, the farther we go, the more distant the 
goal becomes. The goal of life is living, and it is to ever-' 
moving and ever-renewing life that our ideal leads us. 

When we follow the march of time and pass from one 
people to another, the forms of that ideal seem to 
change. But what changes, basically, is the needs 
of a given time or the needs of given peoples whose 
future alone can show, across the variations of appear- 
ances, the identity of their nature and the character 
of their usefulness to us. Scarcely have we left the 
Egypto-Hellenic world* before we see, stretching before 
us like a plain, the kingdom of the mind. The temples 
of the Hindoos and the cathedrals break into its 
frontiers, the cripples of Spain and the poor of Hol- 
land invade it without introducing even one of those 
types of general humanity through which the first 
artists had defined our needs. What does it matter? 
The great dream of humanity can recognize, there 
again, the effort toward adaptation which has always 
guided it. Other conditions of life have appeared, 
different forms of art have made us feel the necessity 
for understanding them in order to direct us in the 
path of our best interests. Real landscape, the life 
of the people, and the life of the middle class, arrive 
and powerfully characterize the aspects of every day, 
into which our soul, exhausted with its dream, may 
retire and refresh itself. The appeal of misery and 
despair, even, is made, that we may get back to our- 
selves, know ourselves, and strengthen ourselves. 



INTRODUCTION xxix 

If we turn to the Egyptians, to the Assyrians, the 
Greeks, the Hindoos, the French of the Middle Ages, 
the Italians, and the Dutch, one after the other, it is 
that we belong now to one group of surroundings, 
now to one epoch, now to one minute, even of our 
time or of our life, which has need of a given people 
more than of another one. When we are cold we seek 
the sun; we seek the shadow when we are warm. The 
great civilizations which have formed us are each 
entitled to an equal share of our gratitude, because 
we have successively asked of each the things we 
lacked. We have lived tradition when it was to our 
interest to live it, and have accepted revolution when 
it saved us. We have been idealists when the world 
was abandoning itself to discouragement or was fore- 
seeing new destinies, realists when it seemed to have 
found its provisional stability. We have not asked 
for more reserve from passionate races or more ardor 
from positive races, because we have understood the 
necessity of passion and the necessity of the positive 
spirit. It is we who wrote the immense book wherein 
Cervantes has recounted our generous enthusiasm 
and our practical common sense. We have followed 
one or the other of the great currents of the mind, 
and we have been able to invoke arguments of almost 
equal value to justify our inclinations. What we 
call idealistic art, what we call realistic art, are momen- 
tary forms of our eternal action. It is for us to seize 
the immortal moment when the forces of conserva- 
tion and the forces of revolution in life marry, for the 
realization of the equilibrium of the human soul. 



XXX INTRODUCTION 

Thus, whatever the form in which a thing is offered 
to us, whether true now or true in our desire, or true 
both in its immediate appearance and in its possible 
destinies, the object by itself and the fact by itself 
are nothing. They count only through their infinitely 
numerous relationships with infinitely complex sur- 
roundings. And it is these relationships, never twice 
the same, which translate universal feelings of an 
infinite simplicity. Each fragment of the work, 
because it is adapted to its end, however humble that 
end may be, must extend itself in silent echoes through- 
out the whole of the depth and breadth of the work. 
Its sentimental tendencies are, in reality, secondary: 
"Beautiful painting," said Michael Angelo, "is religious 
in itself, for the soul is elevated by the effort it has 
to make to attain perfection and to mingle with God; 
beautiful painting is a reflection of that divine perfec- 
tion, a shadow from the brush of God ... !" 

Idealistic or realistic, a thing of the present day or 
of general conditions, let the work live, and in order 
to live, let it be one, first of all! The work which has 
not this oneness dies, like the ill-formed creatures 
which the species, evolving toward higher destinies, 
must eliminate little bv little. The work which is 
one, on the contrary, lives in the least of its frag- 
ments. The breast of an ancient statue, a foot, an 
arm, even when half devoured by subterranean mois- 
ture, quivers and seems warm to the touch of the 
hand, as if vital forces were still modeling it from 
within. The unearthed fragment is alive. It bleeds 
like a wound. Over the gulf of the centuries, the 



• INTRODUCTION xxxi 

mind finds its relations with the pulverized debris, 
it animates the organism as a whole with an existence 
which is imaginary, but present to our emotion. It 
is the magnificent testimony to the human importance 
of art, engraving the effort of our intelligence on the 
seats of the earth, as the bones we find there trace 
the rise of our material organs. 

To realize unity in the mind and to transmit it to 
the work is to obey that need of general and durable 
order which our universe imposes on us. The scientist 
expresses this order by the law of continuity, the 
artist by the law of harmony, the just man by the 
law of solidarity. These three essential instruments 
of our human adaptation — science, which defines the 
relations of fact with fact; art, which suggests the rela- 
tions of the fact with man; and morality which seeks 
the relations of man with man — establish for our use, 
from one end of the material and spiritual world to the 
other, a system of relations whose permanence and 
utility demonstrate its logic to us. They teach us 
what serves us, what harms us. Nothing else matters 
verj' greatly. There is neither error nor truth, neither 
ugliness nor beauty, neither evil nor good outside of 
the use in human problems which we give to our three 
instruments. The mission of our sensibility, of our 
personal intelligence, is to establish the value of them, 
through searching out, from one to the other, the 
mysterious passages which will permit us to grasp the 
continuity of our effort, in order to comprehend and 
accept it as a whole. By so doing we shall, little by 
little, utilize what we call error, ugliness, and evil. 



xxxii INTRODUCTION • 

as means to a higher education and realize harmony 
in ourselves, that we may extend it about us. 

Harmony is a profound law, which goes back to 
primitive unity, and the desire for it is imposed on us 
by the most general and the most imperious of all the 
realities. The forms we see live only through the 
transitions which unite them. And by these tran- 
sitions the human mind can return to the common • 
source of the forms, just as it can follow the nourishing 
current of the sap starting from the flowers and the 
leaves to go back to the roots. Consider a landscape 
stretching back to the circle of the horizon. A plain 
covered with grasses, with clump of trees, a river flow- 
ing to the sea, roads bordered with houses, villages, 
wandering beasts, men, a sky full of light or of clouds. 
The men feed on the fruit of the trees and on the 
meat and milk of the beasts, which yield their fur and 
their skins for clothing. The beasts live on grasses 
and leaves, and if the grasses and the leaves grow it 
is because the sky takes from the sea and the rivers 
the water which it spreads upon them. Neither birth 
nor death — life, permanent and confused. All aspects 
of matter interpenetrate one another, general energy 
is in flux and reflux, it flowers at everv moment, to 
wither and to reflower in endless metamorphoses; 
the symphony of the colors and the symphony of the 
murmurs are but little else than the perfume of the 
inner symphony which issues from the circulation of 
forces in the continuity of forms. 

The artist comes, seizes the universal law, and renders 
us a world complete, whose elements, characterized by 



INTRODUCTION xxxiii 

their principal relations, all participate in the harmoni- 
ous accomplishment of the ensemble of its functions. 

Spencer saw the bare heavenly bodies escaping from 
the nebulae, solidifying, little by little, the water con- 
densing on their surface, elementary life arising from 
the water, diversifying its appearances, every day lift- 
ing higher its branches, its twigs, its fruits, and, as a 
spherical flower opens to give its dust to space, the 
heart of the world expanding in its multiplied forms. 
But it seems that an obscure desire to return to its 
origins governs the universe. The planets, issue of 
the sun, cannot tear themselves from its encircling 
force, though they seem to want to plunge back into 
it. Atom solicits atom, and all living organisms, 
coming from the same cell, seek living organisms to 
make that cell again through burying themselves in 
each other. . . . Thus the just man contents himself 
with living, thus the scientist and thé artist delve 
into the world of forms and feelings and cause their 
consciousness to retrace its steps along the road which 
that world traveled, to pass from its ancient homo- 
geneity to its present diversity. And thus, in a heroic 
effort, they re-recreate primitive unity. 

Let the artist, therefore, be proud of his life of 
illumination and of pain. Of these heralds of hope 
he plays the greatest role. In every case he can 
attain this role. Scientific activity, social activity 
bear within themselves a signification sufficiently 
defined for them to be self-sufficient. Art touches 
science through the world of forms, which is the ele- 
ment of its work, it enters the social plane by addressing 



xxxiv INTRODUCTION 

itself to our faculty of love. There are great savants 
who cannot arouse emotion in us, men of great honesty 
who' cannot reason. There is no hero of art who is 
not at the same time (through the sharp and long 
conquest of his means of expression) a hero of knowl- 
edge and a human hero of the heart. When he feels 
living within him the earth and space and all that 
moves and all that lives, even all that seems dead — 
to the verj' tissue of the stones — how could it be that 
he should not feel the life of the emotions, the passions, 
the sufferings of those who are made as he is? Whether 
he knows it or not, whether he wants it or not, his art 
is of a piece with the work of the artists of yesterday 
and the artists of to-morrow; it reveals to the men of 
to-day the solidarity of their effort. All action in 
time, all action in space have their goal in his action. 
It is his place to affirm the agreement of the thought 
of Jesus, of the thought of Newton, and of the thought 
of Lamarck. And it is on that account that Phidias 
and Rembrandt must recognize each other and that 
we must recognize ourselves in them. 



PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION (1920) 

I HAVE been on the point of suppressing the pages 
which serve as an Introduction to the first edition 
of this book. I judged tliem — I still judge them 
—boyish and tearful in their philosophy, and obscure 
and badly written as well. I have given up my inten- 
tion. After all, those pages represent a moment of 
myself. And since I have attempted to express that 
moment, it no longer belongs to me. 

Perhaps one ought to write works composed of 
several volumes in a few months, their documenta- 
tion once finishes! and the ideas they represent having 
been thoroughly set in order. The unity of the work 
would gain thereby. But the ensemble of the worker's 
effort would doubtless lose. Every time he thinks 
be has been mistaken, a living desire awakens in him, 
which pushes him on to new creations. In reality, 
each writer writes only one book, each painter paints 
only one picture. Every new work is destined, in 
the mind of its author, to correct the preceding one, 
to complete the thought — which will not be com- 
pleted. He does this work over and over again. 



xxxvi PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION 

wherever his sensation or thought was rendered imper- 
fectly in the preceding work. WTien man interro- 
gates and exerts himself, he does not really change. 
He only rids his nature of what is foreign to it, and 
deepens that portion that is his own. Those who 
bum their work before it is known, because it no 
longer satisfies them, are credited with great courage. 
I ask myself whether there is not still greater courage 
in admitting that one has not always been what one 
has become, in becoming what one is not yet, and in 
permitting to remain alive the material and irrefutable 
witnesses of the variations of one's mind. 

I have, therefore, no more suppressed the Iniroduc- 
tion of this volume than the chapters which follow 
it, where, however, ideas will also be found that I 
have great difficulty in recognizing to-day.' I cannot 
change the face that was mine ten years ago. And 
even if I could, should I exchange it for the one that 
is mine at the present day? I should lose, doubtless, 
for it is less young now. And who knows if one does 
not hate — just because one is older — the signs of youth 
in one's mind, as one disdains — because one regrets 
them — the remembrances of youth in one's body? 
In any case, hateful or not, one cannot modify the 
features of a face without at the same time destroy- 
ing the harmony of the old face, and thereby com- 
promising the features of the future face. For the 
irp»>ntpr nnpf of the ideas which we think constitute 

Ihat I have introduced into this new cditioa — additions 
neither add to nor subtract from anything from the 
of the work. They bear almost eidusivdy on the 



PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION xxxvii 

our present truth have as their origin precisely those 
which we believe constitute our past error. When we 
consider one of our early works, the passages which 
strike us the most are those which we love least. Soon 
we see no more than these; they fascinate us; they 
mask the entire work. On closing the book again 
they still pursue us; we ask ourselves why, and the 
result is — however little our courage — that we open 
roads for ourselves which we had not suspected. Thus 
it is that the critical spirit, made sharp and subtle by 
the disappointments and sufferings of one's intellectual 
development, becomes, little by little, the most precious, 
and doubtless the most active, auxiliary of the creative 
spirit itself. 

I am a "self-taught" man. I confess it without 
shame and without pride. This first volume, which 
weighs on me, has served at least to inform me that if 
I was not yet, at the moment when I wrote it, out of 
the social herd, I was already repelled from entering 
the philosophic herd. The fact is that preconceived 
notions of aesthetics were so far from presiding over 
my education in art that it is my emotions as an 
artist which have led me, progressively, to a phil- 
osophy of art which becomes less and less dogmatic. 
In many of these old pages there will be found traces 
of a finalism which, I hope, has almost disappeared 
from my mind. The reason is that I have evolved 
with the forms of art themselves, and that, instead 
of imposing on the idols I adored a religion, I have 
asked these idols to teach me religion. All, in fact, 
revealed the same one to me, as well as the fact that 



xxxvîii PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION 

it was quite impossible to fix it precisely, because it 
is universal. 

I have had to make an effort in order to reach a 
harmonious conception of the plastic pK)em in which 
men commune. Even now it remains an undemon- 
strable, an intuitive, even a mystical, conception, if 
you like to call it that. Yet, in consideration of the 
effort expended, I hope that I may be pardoned 
the didactic solemnity of the beginning of my book. 
It is the mark of the thirtieth year, among those, at 
least, who have not the privilege of being free men at 
twenty and slaves at forty. When analysis begins to 
corrode one's early illusions, one draws oneself together, 
one wants to keep them intact, one defends oneself 
against the new illusions which are outlining them- 
selves; one insists on remaining faithful to ideas and 
images, to means of expression that are no longer a 
part of one. One surrounds oneself with a hard mold 
which hampers one's movements. Is not that, in all 

«esthetic and moral evolutions of the past and the 

• 

present, exactly the passage from the first instinctive 
ingenuousness to the free discovery of a second ingen- 
uousness, exactly such a passage as we see in the 
stiffness of all archaisms? If I am not mistaken in 
this, I should be very well pleased if the tense char- 
acter of the beginning of my book corresponded even 
a little to the tenseness of the first and most innocent 
among the builders of temples, the painters of tombs, 
and the sculptors of gods. 

I have been reproached with having written not a 
"History of Art," but rather a sort of poem concern- 



PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION xxxîx 

ing the history of art. This reproach has left me 
wondering. I have asked myself what, outside of 
pure and simple chronology, the recital of inner events 
could be, when the material expression of those events 
consists entirelv of affective elements. In the sense 
in which the historians understand historj-, synoptic 
tables suffice, and I have prepared them. There is 
no history except that summed up by these tables 
which is not, fatally, submitted to the interpretation 
of the historian.^ What is true of the history of man's 
actions is infinitely more so of the history of his ideas, 
his sensations, and his desires. I cannot conceive a 
history of art otherwise than made up of a poetic 
transposition, not as exact, but as living as possible, 
of the plastic poem conceived by humanity. I have 
attempted that transposition. It is not my place to 
sav whether I have succeeded with it. 

To state the question a little differently, it seems to 
me that history should be understood as a symphony. 
The description of the gestures of men has no interest 
for us, no use, no sense even, if we do not try to seize 
on the profound relationships of these gestures, to 
show how they link together in a chain. We must 
try, especially, to restore their dynamic character, 
that unbroken germination of nascent forces engendered 
by the ceaseless play of the forces of the past on the 
forces of the present. Every man, every act, every 
work is a musician or an instrument in an orchestra. 
One cannot regard, it seems to me, the cymbal player 
or the triangle player as of the same importance as the 

'Or rather, what history is there that the historian does not interpret? 



xl PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION 

violoncellos or of the mass of violins. The historian 
is the leader of the orchestra in that symphony which 
the multitudes compose with the collaboration of the 
artists, the philosophers, and the men of action. The 
historian's role is that of making clear the essential 
characters, to indicate their great lines, to make their 
volumes stand out, to contrast their lights with their 
shadows, to shade off the passages and harmonize the 
tones. It is so for the art-historian far more than for 
the historian of action — because the importance of 
action registers itself automatically in its results and 
traces, whereas the importance of a work of art is an 
affair of appreciation. 

The historian should be partial. The historian 
who calls himself a scientist simply utters a piece of 
folly. I do not know, nor he either, any measuring 
instrument which shall permit him to graduate the 
respective importance of Leochares and Phidias, of 
Bernini and Michael Angelo. It seems that this is 
admitted with regard to literary history, and that no 
one thinks of getting wrought up if the historian of 
letters forgets Paul de Kock, voluntarily or not, to 
dilate upon Balzac. Neither is anyone surprised if the 
professor at the Sorbonne, writing a history of France, 
gives more importance to the gestures of Napoleon than 
to those of Clarke or Maret. The purists protest only 
when the partiality of sentiment intervenes to judge 
Napoleon, Clarke, or Maret. They do not realize that 
the mere statement of facts already supposes a choice 
made by men as a whole or by the events themselves, 
before the historian begins to intervene. 



PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION xli 

When the question is one of contemporary history, 
the part of the orchestra leader is much more arduous 
to perform. The view of the facts as seen from a 
distance, the more or less strong or persistent influence 
of the events on minds, the memory that they have 
left, all these impose on him who writes a commentary 
of the past, certain summits, certain depressions, 
visible to all. And to recreate a living organism 
from them he need do no more than join them with 
a curve. From nearer by, intuition alone decides, 
and the courage to make use of it. So much the 
worse for him who does not dare and cannot leave to 
the future the task of saying whether he has done well 
or ill in dealing with the works and the men of his time, 
as an artist does with the light and shade which he 
distributes on the object. It is possible that, from 
the orthodox point of view of history, it is a heresy 
to affirm that the slightest study by Renoir, the 
slightest water color by Cézanne belongs much more 
effectively to the history of art than the hundred 
thousand canvases exhibited in ten years in all the 
salons of painting. And, notwithstanding, one must 
risk that heresy. The poet of the present makes the 
history of the future. 

Let us go farther. The gesture of a hungry man 
who stretches out his hand, the words that a woman 
murmurs in the ear of the passer-by on some ener- 
vating evening, and the most infinitesimal human 
gesture have a much more important place in the his- 
tory of art itself than the hundred thousand canvases 
in question, and the associations of interest which try 



xlii PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION 

to impose them on the public. The orchestral multi- 
tude brings into prominence the playing of artists like 
Cézanne and Renoir, and it is they, in turn, who make 
clear to us the value of the multitude, which is com- 
posed, only to an insignificant degree, of the mass of 
mediocre works. Amid them its voice arises like a 
cry in a silence full of indiscreet mimicry and excessive 
gesture. Our orchestra takes its elements from the 
widely scattered manners and customs, from the whole 
of their action on the evolution and exchange of ideas; 
it is in the discoveries, the needs, the social conflicts 
of the moment, the obscure and formidable upheavals 
that love and hunger provoke in the depths of collective 
life and the hidden springs of the individual conscience. 
I am quite willing to mention even the movement 
called "artistic," which'floats on the surface of his- 
tory by means of institutes, schools, and official doc- 
trines, like a rouge badly applied to a woman's face. 
,It plays its little part in the great plastic symphony 
wherein Renoir and Cézanne in our time, for example, 
like Rubens and Rembrandt in another, play the 
most illustrious role. But it is only by indirect means 
that the spirit created in the crowds by this, "artistic" 
movement, reacts on each new affirmation of a great 
artist — ^who is unaware of practically all its manifes- 
tations. I think that if the risk is greater for the 
modern historian who gives prominence to Cézanne 
on^ HoTi^ir [n his narrative, his attempt is as legiti- 
n the "scientific" point of view as — for the 
of the past— the custom of quite candidly 
>re importance to Phidias than to Leochares. 



PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION xliii 

The fact is that we have been for more than a cen- 
tury — smce Wmckelmann approximately — far too 
much inclined to tolerate a growing confusion between 
art history and archaeology. One might as well 
confuse literature and grammar. It is one thing to 
describe, by their external character, the monuments 
that man has left on his joiuney, to measure them, to 
define their functions and style, to locate them in place 
and time — it is another thing to try to tell by what 
secret roots these monuments plunge to the heart of 
races, how they sum up the most essential desires of 
the races, how they form the recognizable testimony 
to the sufferings, the needs, the illusions, and the 
mirages which have hollowed out in the flesh of all 
men, living and dead, the bloody passage from sensa- 
tion to mind. It is thus that in wanting to write a 
history that should not be a dry catalogue of the 
plastic works of man, but a passionate narrative of 
the meeting of his curiosity and education with the 
forms that lie in his path, I may have committed — ^I 
have committed — errors of archaeology. Although I 
know worse errors, and although I have not failed to 
commit some of these besides, I will not go so far as to 
say that I do not regret them. 

Archaeology has been profoundly useful. By seek- 
ing and finding original sources, by establishing family 
likenesses, filiations, and the relationships of works 
and of schools, little by little, in the face of the diver- 
sity in the form of the images (from which so many 
warring schools of aesthetics have been inspired to 
create silly exclusivisms), archaeology has defined the 



xliv PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION 

original analogy of these works and schools and the 
almost constant parallelism of their evolution. Every- 
where, behind the artist, it has aided us to rediscover 
the man. Those among us, who have to-day become 
capable of entering into immediate communion with 
the most unexpected forms of art, evidently do not 
take note that such communion is the fruit of a long» 
previous education, for which archaeology is doubtless 
the best preparation, however convinced of the fact 
it is itself. Those who rise up with the greatest con- 
tempt against the insensibility of the archaeologist 
are probably those who owe him the greater part, if 
not of their sensibility, at least of the means which 
have permitted them to refine it. To-day we laugh 
at the worthy persons who grant scarcely a pitying 
look at the lofty spirituality of Egyptian statues, or 
who recoil in disgust before the grandiose bestiality 
of Hindu bas-reliefs. Notwithstanding, there were 
artists who jelt like those same worthy persons. I 
should not affirm that Michael Angelo would not have 
shrugged his shoulders before an Egyptian colossus, 
and I am quite sure that Phidias would have thrown 
Rembrandt's canvases into the fire. Archaeology, in 
plastics, is classification in zoology. Unknown to 
itself, it has fundamentally recreated the great inner 
unity of the universal forms and permitted the uni- 
versal man to affirm himself in the domain of the 
mind. That this universal man will one day realize 
himself in the social realm is a thing I shall beware 
of maintaining, although it is a possible thing. But 
that some men, among the great diversity of the idols. 



PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION xlv 

can seize upon the one god who animates them all, is 
a thing as to which I may be permitted, I hope, to 
rejoice with them. Doubtless I shall even try soon 
to draw forth from the idols some of the features of 
this god.^ 

But not here. The scope is not broad enough. 
And I hope my reader is too impatient to approach 
the recital of the adventures which I have tried to 
relate for him, to consent to pick its flower before we 
have had the joy of breathing its perfume together. 
However, I should not like to have the slightest mis- 
understanding exist between him and me, as we stand 
at the threshold of this book. I have already warned 
him that I scarcely recognized myself in these opening 
pages of a work already old. They constitute, more- 
over, an obscure and often common plea for the utility 
of art. I want to dissipate the ambiguity. I have 
not ceased to think that art is useful. I have even 
strengthened my feeling as to that fK)int. Not only 
is art useful, but it is, without the least doubt, the 
only thing that is, after bread, really useful to us all. 
Before bread, perhaps, for if we eat, it is really that 
we may keep up the flame which permits us to absorb 
— that we may recast it and spread it forth — the 
world of beneficent illusions which reveals itself and 
modifies itself, without a break, around us. From 
the caveman's or the lakeman's necklace of bones to 
the image d^Ejnnal tacked to the wall of the country 
tavern, from the silhouette of the aurochs dug in the 
wall of the grotto in Perigord to the ikon of the bed- 

^The Spint of the Forms (forthcoming). 



xlvi PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION 

room before which the muzhik keeps his lamp burn- 
ing, from the war dance of the Sioux to the "Heroic 
Symphony," and from the graven design tinted, with 
vermilion and emerald hidden in the night of the 
hypogées to the gigantic fresco which shines in 
splendor in the festival hall of Venetian palaces, the 
desire to arrest in a definite form the fugitive appear- 
ances wherein we think to find the law of our universe, 
as well as our own law, and through which we keep 
alive in ourselves energy, love, and effort — is mani- 
fested with a constancy and a continuity which have 
never abated. Whether this be in dance or song, 
whether it be in an image or in the narrative recited 
to a circle of auditors, it is always the pursuit of an 
inner idol — which we think, each time, to be the final 
pursuit and which we never end. 

Philosophers, in speaking of this "disinterested 
play," affirm the irresistible need, which has urged us 
from the earliest times, to externalize the secret 
cadences of our spiritual rhythm in sounds or in words, 
in color or in form, in gesture or in steps. But the 
need asserts itself from this point of view as, on the 
contrary, the most imiversally interested of the deeper 
functions of the mind. Moreover, all games in them- 
selves, even the most childish, are attempts to establish 
order in the chaos of confused sensations and senti- 
ments. Man in his movement thinks that he adapts 
himself unceasingly to the surrounding world in its 
movement. And he believes that this adaptation 
takes place through the fleeting certitude he has of 
describing it forever in the intoxication of expression, 



PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION xlvii 

as soon as he imagines that he has grasped a phenom- 
enon as a whole. Thus, what is most useful to men 
is play. 

The love of play, and the search for it, and the 
ardent curiosity which is a condition of play, create 
civilization. The civilizations — I should have said, 
those oases sown the length of time or dispersed in 
space, now alone, now interpenetrating, fusing at 
other times, attempting schemes, one after another, 
for a imanimous spiritual understanding among men 
— a possible, probable understanding, but one that is 
undoubtedly destined, if it be realized, to decline, to 
die, to seek within itself and around it the elements 
of a renewal. A civilization is a lyric phenomenon, 
and it is by the monuments which it raises and leaves 
after it that we appreciate its quality and its grandeur. 
It is defined to the extent that it imposes itself upon 
us through an impressive, living, coherent, and durable 
stvle. What men understand almost unanimously 
as "civilization" at the present hour has nothing at 
all to do with it. The tool of industry — the railroad, 
the machine, electricity, the telegraph — is only a tool. 
Whole peoples can employ it for immediate and mate- 
rially interested purposes, without any opening up 
in them, by that employment, of the deep springs of 
attention and emotion, of the passion for understand- 
ing, and the gift for expressing which alone lead to 
the great aesthetic style wherein a race communes 
for a moment with the spirit of the universe. From 
this point of view the Egypt of five thousand years 
ago, the China of five centuries ago are more civilized 



can, thank-s to these tools, make up vaster sympho- 
nies, more mixed and conipUcated witli influences 
and echoes, and served bj- a far greater number of 
instruments. But "moral progress," like "œsthetic 
progress." is merely bait which the social philosopher 
offers to the simple man in order to incite and increase 
his effort. Evil, error, ugliness, and folly will always, 
in the development of a new style, play tlieir indis- 



PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION xlix 

pensable role as a real condition of imagination, of 
meditation, of idealism, and of faith. Art is a light- 
ning flash of harmony that a i>eople or a man conquers 
from the darkness and the chaos which precede him, 
follow him, necessarily surround him. And Prome- 
theus is condemned to seize the fire only that he may 
light up for a second the living wound in his side and 
the calm of his brow. 



ANCIENT ART 



Vezere at EyziEs 



Chapter I. BEFORE HISTORY 



riHE dust of Ijones, primitive weapons, 
coal, and buried wood — the old human 
as well as solar energy — come down to 
5 tangled like roots in the fermentation 
of the dampness under the earth. The 
earth is the giver of life and the murderess, the dif- 
fused matter whieli drinks of death to nourish life. 
Living things are dissolved by her, dead things move 
in her. She wears down the stone, siie gives it the 
golden pallor of ivory or of bone. Ivory and bone 
before they are devoured become rough as stone at 
her touch. The wrought flints have the appearance 
of big triangular teeth ; the teeth of the engulfed mon- 
sters are like pulpy tubercles ready to sprout. The 
skulls, the vertebrie, and tiie turtle shells have the 
gentle and somber pafina of the old sculptures with 



4 ./ANCIENT ART 

their quality.'trf. absoluteness. The primitive engrav- 
ings reseniH)«-iliose fossii imprints which have revealed 
to us the'-QJtture of the shell formations, of the plants 



Austria (Cuveni <if Willendorff). Statuette 
of a woman, olilliic jimestone (Vienna). 

and the insects which have disappeared, of turbans, 
arborescences, ferns, elytra, and n(■r^'ed leaves. A 
prehistoric mnseuiu is a petrified garden where the 



BEFORE HISTORY 5 

slow action of earth and water on the buried materials 
unifies the work of man and the work of the elements. 
Above lies the forest of the 
great deer — the open wings of 
the mind.i 

The discomfiture which we 
experience on seeing our most 
ancient bones and implements 
mingled with a soil full of tiny 
roots and insects has some- 
thing of the religious in it. It 
teaches us that our effort to 
extricate the rudimentary ele- 
ments of a social harmony 
from animalism surpasses, in 
essential power, all our sub- 
sequent efforts to realize in 
the mind a superior harmony 
which, moreover, we shall not 
attain. There is no invention. 
The foundation of the human Chipped flint 

edifice is made of everyday {Museum of Saint Germain). 
discoveries, and its highest 

towers have been patiently built up from progressive 
generalizations. Man copied the form of his hunting 

' The illustrating of this chapter having presented special difficulties, we 
offer our n-armest thanks to Messrs. Capitan and Breuil, on one hand, and 
to the firm of Masson et Cîe,. on the other, without whom we should not 
have been able to carry through our task. The n'orks of Abbé Breuil. 
most of all, constitute the basis which will henceforth be indispensable for 
the artistic illustrating of any book devoted to the prehistoric period. It 
is, thanks to bis admimble puletg. that the tru^odyte frescoes of Périgord 
and of Spain have been given back to ub in what is most probably their 

ori^tial character. 



6 ANCIENT ART 

and industrial implements from beaks, teeth, and claws; 
from fruits he borrowed their forms for his first pots. 
His awls and needles were at first thorns and fishbones; 
he grasped, in the overlapping scales of the fish, in 
the articulation and setting of bones, the idea of 
structure, of joints and levers. Here is the sole point 
of departure for the miracle of abstraction, for for- 
mulas wholly purified of all trace of experience, and 
for the highest ideal. And it is here that we must 
seek the measure at once of our humility and strength. 

The weapon, the tool, the vase, and, in harsh cli- 
mates, a coarse garment of skins — such are the first 
forms, foreign to his own substance, that primitive 
man fashions. He is surrounded by beasts of prey 
and is assailed constantly by the hostile elements of 
a still chaotic nature. He sees enemy forces in fire, 
in storms, in the slightest trembling of foliage or of 
water, in the seasons, even, and in day and night, 
until the seasons and day and night, with the beating 
of his arteries and the sound of his steps, have given 
him the sense of rhythm. Art is, in the beginning, a 
thing of immediate utility, like the first stammerings 
of speech; something to designate the objects which 
surround man, for him to imitate or modify in order 
that he may use them; man goes no farther. Art 
cannot yet be an instrument of philosophic generali- 
zation, since man could not know how to utilize it. 
But he forges that instrument, for he already abstracts 
from his surroundings some rudimentary laws which 
he applies to his own advantage. 

The men and youths range the forests. Their 



BEFORE fflSTORY 7 

weapon is at first the knotty branch torn from the oak 
or the elm, the stone picked up from the ground. The 
women, with the old men and the children, remain 
hidden in the dwelling, an improvised halting place 
or grotto. From his first stumbling steps man comes 
to grips with an ideal — the fleeing beast which repre- 
sents the immediate future of the tribe; the evening 
meal, devoured to make muscle for the hunters; milk 
for the mothers. Woman, on the contrarv, has 
before her only the near and present reality — the 
meal to prepare; the child to nourish; the skin to 
be dried; later on, the fire that is to be tended. It 
is she, doubtless, who finds the first tool and the first 
pot; it is she who is the first workman. It is from her 
realistic and conservative role that human industry 
takes its beginnings. Perhaps she also assembles 
teeth and pebbles into necklaces, to draw attention 
to herself and to please. But her positivist destiny 
closes the horizon to her, and the first veritable artist 
is man. It is man, the explorer of plains and forests, 
the navigator of rivers, who comes forth from the 
caverns to study the constellations and the clouds; 
it is man, through his idealistic and revolutionary 
function, who is to take possession of the objects made 
by his companion, to turn them, little by little, into 
the instruments that express the world of abstrac- 
tions which appears to him confusedly. Thus from 
the beginning the two great human forces realize 
that equilibrium which will never be destroyed; 
woman, the center of immediate life, who brings up 
the child and maintains the family in the tradition 



8 ANCIENT ART 

necessary to social unity; man, the focus of the life 
of the imagination, who plunges into the unexplored 
mj'sterj' to preserve society from death through his 
directing of it into the courses of unbroken evolution. 



Cavern ok Bruniquel (Tarn-et-Garonntr). Mammoth, 
carved reindeer horn (Museum of Sainl Germain). 

Masculine idealism, which later becomes a desire 
for moral contiuest, is at first a desire for material 
conquest. For primitive man it is a question of 
killing animals in order to have meat, bones, and 
skins, and of charming a woman so as to perpetuate 
the species whose voice cries in his veins; it is a ques- 
tion of frightening the men of the neighboring tribe 
who want to carry off his male or trespass on his 
hunting ground. To create, to pour forth his being, 
to invade surrounding life — in fact, all his impulses 
have their center in the reproductive instinct. It is 
his point of departure for all his greatest conquests, 



BEFORE fflSTORY 9 

his future need for moral communion and his will to 
devise an instrument through which he may adapt 
himself intellectually to the law of his universe. He 
already has the weapon — the plate of flint; he needs 
the ornament that charms or terrifies — bird plumes 
in the knot of his hair, necklaces of claws or teeth, 
carved handles for 
his tools, tatooings, 
bright colors deco- 
rating his skin. 
■ Art is bom. One 
of the men of the 

tribe is skillful in „ /i- i i .1 , n ■ i 

Switzerland (Kcsalerlotli). Reindeer 

cutting a form in a grazing, e^gra^■e<^ on reindt-er }iorn 
bone, or in painting {Museum of Saird Germain). 

on a torso a bird 

with open wings, a mammoth, a lion, or a flower. 
On his return from the hunt he picks up a piece 
of wood to give it the appearance of an animal, a 
bit of clay to press it into a figurine, a flat bone 
on which to engrave a silhouette. He enjoys seeing 
twenty rough and innocent faces bending over his 
work. He enjoys this work itself which creates an 
obscure understanding between the others and him- 
self, between him and the infinite world of beings and 
of plants that he loves, because he is the life of that 
world. He obeys something more positive also — 
the need to set down certain acquisitions of primitive 
human science so that the whole of the tribe may 
profit by them, Words but inadequately describe 
to the old men, to the women gathered about, to the 



10 ANCIENT ART 

children especially, the form of a beast encountered 
in the woods who is either to be feared or hunted. 
The artist fixes its look and its form in a few summary 
strokes. Art is bom. 



The oldest humanity known, which defines our en- 
tire race, inhabited the innumerable grottos of the 
high Dordogne. near the rivers full of fish and flow- 
ing through reddish rocks and forests of a region once 
thrown into upheaval by volcanoes. That was the 
central hearth; but colonies swarmed the whole length 
of the banks of the Lot, of the Garonne, of the Ariège, 
and even to the two slopes of the Pyrenees and the 



GaoTTO OF Chaffaud (Vienna). Docs, engraved bone 
(Mmeitm of Saint Germain). 

Cévennes. The earth was beginning to tremble less 
from the subterranean forces. Thickly growing green 
trees filled with their healthy roots the peat bogs that 
hid the great skeletons of the last chaotic monsters. 
The hardening of the crusl of the earth, the rains and 
the winds that were regularized by the woods, the 



BEFORE HISTORY 11 

seasons with their increasingly regular rhythm, were 
introducing into nature a more apparent harmony. 
A suppler and more logical species, less submerged in 
primitive matter, had appeared little by little. If 
the cold waters, where the mammoth, the rhinoceros, 
and the lion of the caves came to drink, still harbored 
the hippofKîtamus, there were great numbers of horses, 
oxen, bison, wild goats, and aurochs living in the 
woods. The reindeer, the friend of the ice which 
descended from the Alps, the Pyrenees, and the 
Cévennes to the edge of the plains, lived there in 
numerous herds. Man had emerged from the beast 
in an overwhelming silence. He appeared about as 
he is to-day, with straight legs, short arms, a straight 
forehead, receding jaw, and a round and voluminous 
skull. By the action of the mind he is to introduce 
that harmony which was beginning to reign around 
him, into an imagined world which, little by little, 
would become his veritable reality and his reason for 
action. 

The primitive evolution of his conception of art is, 
as we may naturally understand, extremely obscure. 
At such a distance everything seems on the same 
plane, and the divisions of time we establish are 
doubtless illusory. The paleolithic period ended with 
the quaternary age, at least twelve thousand years 
before us, and the art of the troglodytes, at that 
distant epoch, had already attained the summit of 
its curve. The development of a civilization is slow 
in proportion as it is primitive. The first steps are 
those that are the most uncertain. The millions of 



12 ANCIENT ART 

flaked axes found in the caverns and in the beds of 
rivers, the few thousands of designs engraved on bone 
or on reindeer horn, the carved hafts and the frescoes 
discovered on the walls of the grottos, evidently repre- 
sent the production of a very long series of centuries. 
The variations of the images preserved cannot be 
explained only by the differences of individual tem- 
f)eraments. The art of the troglodytes is not made 
up of obscure gropings. Jt develops with a logic and 
an increasing intelligence about which we can only 
guess, and of which we can trace the great lines, but 
which we shall doubtless never be able to follow 
step by step. 

What is sure is that the paleolithic artist belonged 
to a civilization that was already very old, one which 
sought to establish, through interpreting the aspects 
of the surroundings in which it was destined to live, 
the very law of these surroundings. Now no civiliza- 
tion, however advanced, has any other incentive or 
any other purpose. The reindeer hunter is not only 
the least limited of primitives, he is the first civilized 
man. He possessed art and fire. 

In any case, the farther we descend with the geolog- 
ical strata into the civilizations of the caverns, the 
more it reveals itself as an organism coherent in its 
extent — from the Central Plateau to the Pyrenees — 
and coherent in its depth through its century-old 
traditions, its already ritualized customs, and its 
power of evolution in submission to the common law 
of strong, human societies. From layer to layer its 
set of tools improves, and its art, starting from the 



BEFORE HISTORY 



13 



humblest industry and culminating in the moving 
frescoes of the grottos of Altamira, follows the logical 
incline that proceeds from the ingenuous imitation 
of the object to its conventional interpretation. First 




Cavern of Combarrelles (Dordogne). Mammoth, scratched 
on interior wall (Revue de r Ecole d* Anthropologie ^ 1902). 

comes sculpture, the object represented through all 
its profiles, having a kind of second real existence; 
then the bas-reUef, which sinks and effaces itself until 
it becomes engraving; finally the great pictorial con- 
j^eiition,.the object projected on a wall.^ 

This suffices for the rejection of the customary 
comparisons. The reindeer hunter is not a contem- 
porary primitive, polar or equatorial; still less is he 

* Thus it is that the Venus of Willendorff, the most ancient human form 
in sculpture that we know, is probably several decades of centuries earlier, 
despite its admirable character, than the works of Vézère and of Altamira. 

2 



14 ANCIENT ART 

a child. The works thiit he has left us are superior 
to the greater part of the production of the Inoits, to 
all those of the Australians, and especially to those 
of children. The present-day primitive has not 
attained a stage so advanced, in his mental evolution. 
As to the child, he does nothing lasting; it is on sand 
or on scraps of paper that he traces his first lines, by 
chance, between other gafiies. He has neither the 



Fond de Gaume (Dordogne). Bisiin, in polychrome, fresco; 

after the pastel by Abbé Breuil in La Carême du Fond de 

Gaume (Capitari. Breuil. and Peyrony). 

will nor the patience nor, above all, the deep need 
that must exist before he can imprint on one hard 
substance with another hard substance the image he 
has in his mind. James Sully ' has very well shown 
this; t he child adheres to an almost exclusively sym- 
' Jamca Sully, Sludiei in Childhood. 



BEFORE HISTORY 15 

bolic representation of nature to a stammering series 
of ideographic signs which he changes at each new 
attempt; he has no care either for the rclationsliips 
of the forms or for their proportions, or for the char- 
acter of the ol>ject which he represents crudely, withon' 



Fond de Gaume (Donlugne). Reindeer grazing, fresco 
{Itevue de l'Erole d'Anthrripologie, 1902); after a pastel by 



studying it, without even casting a glance at it if it 
is within range of his eye. It is probable that he 
draws only from a spirit of imitation, because he has 
seen people draw or because he has seen pictures and 
knows that the thing is possible. If he were not 
deformed by the abuse of conventional language 
which takes place around him, he would model before 
he painted. 

Among the reindeer hunters, it is quite rare to fmd 
an image of entirel,\' infantile character. In fact, 
•such an image must be the work of a bad imitator 
who has seen an artist of his tribe carving or engraving. 



16 ANCIENT ART 

Or else, as în the south of Spain, ît belongs to a deca- 
dent school, later than the great period, of which 
Altamira is doubtless the highest manifestation. It 
then presents, like all decadences, a double character 
of puerility quite comparable to that of the stam- 
mering attempts of the negroes of South Africa, and 
of artistic refinement, where the ideographic scheme 
is visibly pursued. The real childhood of humanity 
has left us nothing, because it was incapable, like the 
childhood of a man, of continuity in effort. The art 
of the troglodytes of Périgord is not this impossible 
art of human childhood, but the necessary art of human 
youth, the first synthesis which the world, naively 
interrogated, imposes on the sensibility of a man, and 
which he gives back to the community. It is the 
synthetic intuition of the beginnings of the mind, 
which rejoins, across a hundred centuries of analysis, 
the generalizations of the most heroic geniuses, in 
the most civilized ages. Does not natural philosophy 
confirm the greater part of the presentiments of the 
mythological cosmogonies.'^ 

Where should he find the elements of this first 
synthesis if not in his own life.^ Now the life of the 
reindeer hunter is hunting and fishing. He charac- 
terizes it by his whole art — sculpture, bas-relief, 
engraving, and fresco. Everywhere we find wild 
animals and fish. From these, which are associated 
with all his earthly actions, he draws that profound 
love for animal form which makes his work resemble 
natural sculptures — bone-structures twisted by the 
play of muscles, beautiful skeletons sculptured by the 



BEFORE HISTORY 17 

atavistic powers of adaptation to function. All day 
long he sees these animals living, peaceful or hunted, 
grazing or fleeing; he sees the panting of their flanks, 
their jaws opening or shutting, their hair matted with 
blood or sweat, their skins wrinkled like trees or 
mossy like rocks. At evening, in his cavern, he skins 
the dead animals, he sees the bones appear under the 
torn flesh, the tendons shining on the hard surfaces; 
he studies the beautiful smooth vaults of the cavities 
and the heads of joints, the arch of the ribs, of the 
vertebrœ, the round levers of the limbs, the thick ar- 
mament of the pelvis and of the shoulder blades, the 



Fond de Gaume (Dorclogne). Wolf, in polychrome, fresco; 

after the pastel by Abbé BreuM in La Caverne du Fond de 

Gaume (Capilan, Breuil and Peyrony). 

jaws sown with teeth. His hand, which works in 
ivory and horn, is fumlliarized by touch with skele- 
tons, sharp ridges, rough curves, silent and sustained 
planes; and it is the joy of his hand to feel the same 



18 ANCIENT ART 

projections and the same surfaces born of its own work. 
The artist, by great flakes, carves the handles of 
daggers, chisels the polished ivory into the forms of 
beasts, the mammoth with its four feet together, the 
reindeer, the wild goat, and skinned or living heads. 
Sometimes he even tries to rediscover in his material 
the forms of the woman he loves, of the female trog- 
lodyte whose haunches are broad, whose bellv is 
covered with hair and broken down with materm'ty, 
whose warm flesh welcomes the fulfillment of his desire 
or lulls his fatigue. 

Later, with the more rapid process of engraving, 
the field of exploration widens. The whole of the 
glacial fauna invades art. The mammoth, the cave 
bear, the bison, horse, aurochs, and especially the 
reindeer — the reindeer in repose or walking slowly, 
its head to the ground to crop the grass; the reindeer 
galloping, its nostrils to the wind, its horns on its 
back, fleeing before the hunter; sometimes the hunter 
himself, quite naked, hairy, armed with a spear and 
creeping toward the animal. Nothing surpasses the 
direct force of expression of some of these engravings. 
The line is drawn with a single stroke and bites deeply 
into the horn. The artist is often so sure of himself 
that he does not even join his lines, but merely indi- 
cates the direction of the principal ones which portray 
the attitude and mark the character. We see a horse's 
head made up simply of nostrils and jaws; the deli- 
cate legs of a reindeer with sharp hoofs, its horns 
spreading like seaweed or like great butterflies, sharp 
of breast and thin in the rump; hairy mammoths, on 



BEFORE HISTORY 19 

their massive feet, with vast curving spines, long 
trunk, small skull, and sharp little eyes; bison with 
their mountainous backs, their formidable neck and 
hard hocks; fighting beasts, running beasts, irresist- 



FoND DE Gaume (Dordogne). Bison, fresco: after the pastel 
by Abbé Breuil (Revue de t'EcoU d'Anthropologie). 

ible masses, wild flights under the branches — all the 
violent life of the hunter is evoked by these strong 
images, with their rude frame of rivers, great cool 
woods, grottos, dry days, and the cold scintillation 
of the night. 

Never was a human society so thoroughly a part 
of its surroundings as the tribes of reindeer hunters. 
Hunting and fishing are at once the means and the 
purpose of life, and the rude existence is pursued even 
in the evening, in the cavern which forms part of the 
crust of the earth, and from which it was necessary to 
dislodge the Hon and the bear. The tales of the hunt- 



20 ANCIENT ART 

ers, the questions of the children, the work of the 
artists, the workmen in stone and in wood, the women, 
all tell the story of the forest and the water, from 
the skins and the furs stretched on the ground, from 
the implements of bone and ivory, the vegetable 
fibers, the beds of dry leaves, and the fagots of dead 
branches to the stalactites of the vault from which 
moisture drops. On winter evenings, the evenings 
of fires and legends, the dying or rekindling lights 



Altamira (Spain). Female bison, cKarging, fresco; after the 
pastel bv Abbé Breuil in La Caverne d'AUamira (Cartailhac 

and Breuil). 

sketch fleeting apparitions on the shadowy hack- 
ground. They are the dead beasts who return, the 
beasts to be killed .who defy the hunter, those of whose 
meat the tribe has eaten so much, of whose bones it 
has wrought so much that they become protecting 
divinities for the tribe. From that time it was thought 



BEFORE HISTORY 21 

proper to set up their image in the most distant and 
dark corners of the cavern, whence their power would 
be increased by obscurity and mystery.^ Fresco 
appears, broad synthetic paintings, ocherish, black, 
sulphurous, almost terrifying to behold in their shadows 
and through their unfathomable antiquity — reindeer 
and bison, horses and mammoths, sometimes com- 
posite monsters, men with the heads of animals. 
Sometimes, as at Altamira, we find all the beasts in 
a disordered troupe and, amid them, admirable fig- 
ures that only a great artist could create, through 
definite, epitomized, purposeful drawing, through 
subtle modeling that undulates like watered silk, and 
through skillful transitions; the life of it is violent, 
the character is prodigious. 



Ill 

The fresco of the caverns is, therefore, Uie first! 
visible trace, probably, of religion, which will hence- 
forth pursue its course in common with art. It is 
bom, like art, of the contact of sensation and of 
the world. At the beginning, everything, for the 
primitive, is natural, and the supernatural appears 
only with knowledge. Religion, thenceforward, is 
the miracle; it is what man does not know, has not 
yet attained, and later, what he wants to know and 
attain — his ideal. But before the coming of the 
supernatural, everything in nature explains itself 
because man lends to all forms, to all forces, his own 

* Salomon Reinach, VArt et la Magie. 



22 ANCIENT ART 

will and his own desires. It is to attract him th^t 
the water murmurs, to frighten him that the thunder 
rolls, to awaken his anxiety that the wind makes the 
trees tremble, and the beast is, like himself, filled with 
intentions, with malice, with envy. So he must pro- 
pitiate and adore its image, that it may let itself be 
captured and eaten. Religion does not create art; 
on the contrary, it is developed by art, and is planted 
triumphantly in the sensuality of man by giving a 
concrete reality to the happy or terrible images through 
which the universe appears to him. At base, what 
he adores in the image is his own power to render the 
abstraction concrete, and through it to increase his 
means of comprehension. 

But religion is not always so docile. It sometimes 
revolts, and, to establish its supremacy, orders art to 
disappear. That is doubtless what happened in the 
Neolithic periods, sixty centuries perhaps after the 
waters of the deluge had engulfed the civilization of 
the reindeer. For a reason that is not yet well known, 
the air becomes warmer, the ice melts. The ocean 
currents doubtless modify their original course, west- 
em Europe grows warmer and the tepid water of the 
oceans, drawn up by the sun and carried by the winds 
towards the mountains, falls in torrents on the glaciers. 
Water streams through the valleys, the swollen rivers 
drown out the caverns, the decimated tribes flee from 
the disaster, follow the reindeer to the polar regions, 
or wander poverty-stricken and at random, driven 
from one resting place to another by the deluge or 
by hunger. With the daily struggle against elements 



BEFORE HISTORY 23 

too strong for them, with the dispersal of families, 
the loss of traditions and of implements, discourage- 
ment comes, then indifference and the decline toward 
the lower grades of animalism, which had so painfully 
been climbed. When the surroundings become more 
favorable, when the earth dries in the sun, when the 



ALTAMiitA (Spain). Wild boar galloping, fresco: after the 

pastel by Ab)>^ Breuil in La ('anerne d'Allamira (Cartailhac 

and Breuil). 

sky clears and the withdrawing of the glaciers permits 
the grass to grow green and flourish in the moraines, 
everything is to be re-established— the supply of tools, 
shelter, social relationships, and the slow, obscure 
ascent toward the light of the mind. \Miere are the 
reindeer hunters, the first conscious society? The 
prehistoric middle ages give no answer. 

We must await another dawn to reveal the new 
humanity which has elaborated itself in the night. 



24 ANCIENT ART 

It is, moreover, a paler dawn, chilled by a more pos- 

itivist industry, a less powerful life; its religion is 

already turned from its natural source. The weapons 

and implements of stone that are found by millions 

in the mud of the lakes of Switzerland and eastern 

France, over which the re-established human tribes 

erected their houses to get shelter from hostile attacks, 

are now polished like the 

purest metal. Gray, black, 

or green; of all colors, of all 

sizes; axes, scrapers, knives, 

lances, and arrows — they 

have that profound elegance 

whidh always comes from 

close adaptation of the organ 
Pi>tterv of the lake-inon , .. • ,■ ' i - i . j 

,,, e <! • , /■■ ■ \ to the function which created 

{Museum of Saint Gerinaiii). 

it. The lake - dwelling so- 
ciety, which manufactured textiles and raised wheat, 
and was able to discover the ingenious system of 
dwellings built on piles, offers the first example of 
a civilization of predominantly scientific tendencies. 
The organization of life is certainly better regu- 
lated, more positive than in the ancient tribes of 
Vézère, But nothing appears of that ingenuous 
enthusiasm which urged the hunter of Périgord to 
recreate, for the joy of the senses and in the search 
for human communion, the beautiful moving forms 
among which he lived. There are, indeed, in the mud, 
among tlie polished stones, necklaces, bracelets, some 
potteries and numerous other witnesses to a very 
advanced industrial art. testifying to the economic 



BKIÏ>RE HISTORY 25 

character of that society ; but not a sculptured figure, 
not an engraved figure, not a bibelot which would 
lead us to believe that the man of the lakes had any 
presentiment of tlie common origin and vast solidarity 
of all the sensible forms which fill the universe. 

Doubtless when men had retired to the cities on the 
lakes, the beneficent contact with the tree and with 



Menhirs at Plouhermel (Morbihan). 

the beasts of the forest occurred less frequently than 
in the days of the split stone; unquestionably men 
were less often inspired by the spectacle of the living 
play of animal forms. But there is, in the failure of 
the.se men to reproduce these forms, more than a sign 
of indifference. There is a mark of reprobation and 
probably of religious prohibition. Already at the 
same epoch there appear in Brittany and in England 
those -somber battalions of stone, menhirs, dohiiens, 
cromlechs, which have not told their secret, but which 



26 ANCIENT ART 

could scarcely signify anything else than an explosion 
of mysticism, a phenomenon which would be perfectly 
compatible, niopeover — especially in a period of hard 
life — with the positivist activity which the daily 
struggle for bread and shelter necessitates. The 
double, the primitive form of the soul, has made its 
appearance behind the material phantom of beings 



Dolmen at Erdeven (Morbihan). 

and objects. From that time onward the spirit is 
everything, the form is to be disregarded, then con- 
demned; first, because the dwelling of the evil spirit 
is seen in it, then — much later, at the dawn of the great 
ethical religions — because in it will be seen the per- 
manent obstacle to moral, liberation, which is, all 
things considered, the same thing. Even before the 
beginning of history, there appears, in groups of men, 
that need to destroy the equilibrium between our 



BEFORE HISTORY 87 

science and our desires, a need that is perhaps essential 
for the demolishing of a wearied society, in order that 
a field niaj' be left free (or newer races and conceptions. 

However that 
may be.nothing that 
suggests the human 
form has been picked 
up under the dol- 
mens, which also 
shelter flint axes and 
some jewels and — ■ 
ten or twelve cen- 
turies before our era 
— the first metallic 
anus, helmets, ami 
bucklers, bronze and 
iron swords. There 
is, indeed, in Avey- 
ron, a .sculptured 
menhir that repre- 
sents, with extreme 
puerility, a female 
figure; there are. in- 
deed, at Gavrinis. in Ne^uthic age. IMUhH Biiit 
Morbihan, on other {BrUàk Museum). 
menhirs, moving 

arabesques like the lines on the surface of low water, 
undulations or the tremblings of seaweed, which must 
be signs of conjuring or of magic. But, aside from 
these few exceptions. Celtic architecture remains mute. 
We shall never know what force it was that raised 



28 ANCIENT ART 

these enormous tables of stone, erected these virile 
emblems to the sky, this whole hard army of silence 
which seems to have grown unaided from the soil, as if 
to reveal the circulation of the lava which makes the 
earth tremble. 

With the last-raised stones ends the story of the 
prehistoric period in the Western world. Rome is 
coming to clear off the forests, bringing in its steps the 
Orient and Greece, dying Greece, and Assyria and 
Egypt already dead, after each had attained an incom- 
parable summit. Such is the rhythm of history. On 
this soil, fifteen thousand years ago, lived a civilized 
society. It dies without leaving visible traces; five 
or six thousand years are needed for another rudiment 
of a social organism to be born in the same countries. 
But already, in the valley of the Nile, in the valleys 
of the Euphrates and the Tigris, a powerful human 
harvest has grown up, which flourishes for a moment, 
onlv to wither little bv little. Athens mounts to the 
peak of history at the hour when the moors of Brittany 
were being covered with their dull flowers of stone; 
Rome comes to reap them; Rome goes down in the 
flood that rolls from the north; then the rhythm 
quickens — ^great peoples grow up on the cadavers of, 
great peoples. In duration and in extent, history is 
like a boundless sea of which men are the surface and 
whose mass is made up of countries, climates, the 
revolutions of the globe, the great primitive springs, 
the obscure reactions of peoples, one on the other. 
When humanity shall begin to write its annals, the 
abysses will be filled up, the sea will seem quieter. 



r 



BEFORE HISTORY 29 

But perhaps this is nothing but illusion. A people 

Ws like a man. When he has disappeared nothing is 

left of him unless he has taken the precaution to leave 

his imprint on the stones of the road. 
3 



Art of Gaul. The Gallic Hercules (Museum ,.f Au 



Chapter II. EGYPT 




GYPT is the first of those undulations 
which civilized societies make on the sur- 
face of history — undulations that seem 
to be born of nothingness and to return 
to nothingness after having reached a 
summit-! She is the most distant of the defined forms 
which remain upon the horizon of the past. She is 
the true mother of men. But although her achieve- 
ment resounded throughout the whole duration and 
extent of the ancient world, one might say that she 
has closed herself within the granite circle of a solitarj" 
destiny. It is like a motionless multitude, swelled 
with a silent clamor. 

Egypt sinks without a cry into the sand, which has 
taken back, successively, her feet, her knees, her thighs. 



32 ANCIENT ART 

and her flanks, with only her breast and brow pro- 
jecting. The sphinx has still, in his crushed vis- 
age, his inexorable eyes, outlined by rigid lids, 
which look inward as well as outward into the dis- 



Anoent Empire (xxx to xxv Ccntiirv B.C.). Woman 
kneading {Florence, Anhœological Museum). 

tance, from elusive abstractions to the circular line 
where the curve of the globe sinks downward. To 
what depth do his foundations go, and how far around 
him and below him does history descend? He seems 
to have appeared with Qur first thoughts, to have fol- 
lowed our long effort with his mute meditation, to be 
destined to survive our last hope. We shall prevent 
the sand from covering him entirely because he is a 
part of our earth, because he belongs to the appear- 
ances amid which wc have lived, us far back as our 
memories go. Together with the artificial mountains 



EGYPT 33 

with which we have sealed the desert near him, he is 
the only one of our works that seems as permanent as 
the circle of days, the alternation of the seasons, and 
the stupendous daily drama of the sky. 



Ancient Empire (xxx ti> xxv Century B.C.). The 
seated scril>e {Louvre). 

The immobility of this soil, of this people whose 
monotonous life makes up three-quarters of the adven- 
ture of humanity, seems to have demanded lines of 



34 ANCIENT ART 

stone to bind it, and these lines define the soil and the 
people even before we know their history. Everj'- 
thing around the pyramids endures. From the Cata- 



Ancient Empire {4500 B.C.?) Hawk's head, in gold {Caifo 

Museum). After an illustration in Die Plastik der .Egypter 

(published by Cassirer). 

racts to the Delta, the Nile is alone between two 
identical banks, without a current, without a tribu- 
tary, without an eddy, rolling on, from the depths of 
the centuries, its regular mass of water. Fields of 
barley, of wheat, of com, palm tree.s, s\-camores, A 
pitiless blue sky, from which the fire flows ceaselessly 



Ancient Empire (xxv Century B.C.?). Woodea statue, 
detail (Mmeum of the Louvre). 



36 ANCIENT ART 

in sheets, almost dark during the hours of the day 
when the eye can look at it without diflScuIty, lighter 
at night when the rising tide of stars spreads its light 
there. Torrid winds rise from the sands. In the 
light, where the hot air vibrates, shadows are sharply 
outlined on the ground, and the unalterable colors — 
indigos, baked reds, and sulphurous yellows, turned 
to molten metal by twilights of flame, have only, as 
their transparent veil, the periodically changing green 
and gold of the cultivated land. A silence in which 
voices hesitate as if they feared to break crystal walls. 
Beyond these six hundred leagues of fixed and power- 
ful life, the desert — without any other visible limit 
than the absolute circle which is also the horizon of 
the sea. 

The desire felt there to seek and give form to eternity, 
imposes itself on the mind — the more despotically 
since nature retards death itself in its necessary acts 
of transformation and recasting. The granite is 
unbroken. Beneath the soil are petrified forests. In 
that dry air, wood that has been abandoned retains 
its living fibers for centuries, cadavers dry up without 
rotting. The inundation of the Nile, the master of 
the country, symbolizes, each year, perpetual resur- 
rection. Its rise and fall are as regular as the apparent 
march of Osiris, the eternal sun, who arises each morn- 
ing from the waters and disappears each evening in 
the sands. From the 10th of June to the 7th of Octo- 
ber he pours on the calcined countryside the same fat, 
black mud, the mud which is the father of life. 

The Egyptian people never ceased to contemplate 



EGYPT 37 

death. It offered the spectacle without precedent, 
and without another example to follow it, of a race 
intent for eighty centuries on arresting the movement 
of the universe. It believed that organized forms 
alone died, amid an immovable nature. It accepted 
the world of the senses only so long as it seemed to 



Middle Empire (xvii Century). Scribes 
{Florence, ArcktEf^ieat Muneum). 

endure. It pursued the persistence of life in its changes 
of aspect. It imagined alternate existences for itself. 
And the desire all men have to survive mortal death 
cau sed th e Egj'ptians to endow the soul with that 
i ndividual etemi tv of which the duration of cosm ic 
ph enoinena gave them the vam appearance . 

In their estimati on man entered upon his true life 
at death. But, no less than in all the conceptions of 



38 • ANCIENT ART 

immortality which succeeded theirs, did the desire of 
the Egyptians for immortality escape the irresistible 
need to assure a material envelope to the ever-living 
spirit. It was, therefore, necessary to construct a 
secret lodging, where the embalmed body should be 
sheltered from the elements, from beasts of prey, and 
especially from men. It must have with it its familiar 
objects — food and water; it was necessary above all 
that its image, the unchangeable envelope of the 
double which should not leave it again, should accom- 
pany it into the final shadow. And since nothing 
dies, it was necessary to shelter forever the symbolic 
divinities expressing the immutable laws and the res- 
urrection of appearances — Osiris, fire, and the heaven- 
ly bodies, the Nile and the sacred animals which 
regulate the rhythm of their migration by the rhythm 

of its tides and its silences. 

» Egyptian art is religious and funerary. It began 

with the strangest collective madness in history. But 
since its poem to death lives, it touches the highest 
wisdom. The artist saved the philosopher. Tem- 
ples, mountains raised by the hands of men, the Nile's 
own cliffs cut into sphinxes, into silent figures, dug 
out into labyrinthine hypogées, make a living alley of 
tombs to the river. All Egypt is there, even present- 
day Egypt which has required the most unchanging 
of the great modem religions; all Egypt, with its 
broken enigmas, its cadavers buried like treasures, 
perhaps a billion mummies lying in the darkness. 
And that Egypt which wanted to eternalize its soul 
with its bodily form is dead. The Egypt that does 



^ 



Middle Empire (xvii Century B.C.). Culussus of 
Sowekhotep HI llauvre). 



40 ANCIENT ART 

not die is the one which gave to stoneware, to gran- 
ite, and to basalt the form of its mind. Thus the 
human soul perishes with its human envelope. But 
as soon as it is capable of cutting its imprint in an 
external material — stone, bronze, wood, the memory 
of generations, the paper which is recopied, the book 
which is reprinted and which transmits from century 
to century the heroic word and the songs — it acquires 
that relative immortality which endures so long as 
those forms shall endure in which our world has con- 
tinued long . enough to permit us to define it, and, 
through those forms, to define ourselves. 



II 

The temple, which sums up Egypt, has the cate- 
gorical force of the primitive syntheses which 
knew no doubt, and by that very fact ex- 
pressed the only truth we know as durable — that of 
instinctive life in its irresistible affirmation. Formed 
by the oasis, the Egyptian soul repeated the essential 
teachings of the oasis on the walls and in the colunms 
of the temple. It shaped the granite of the temple 
into rectangular masses which rose in a block to the 
hard line of the angles, with the profile of the cliffs, 
with the straight-lined course of the river, with the 
hot sap that made the palm trees tower over the fields 
of emerald, of gold, and of vermilion. Dogma, which 
is a step, an ancient certitude confined within formulas 
open to our senses for the repose of our spirit, assumes 
invincible power when it is submitted for the adora- 



I 



EGYPT 41 

tion of the multitudes in a garb in which they find 
again their true life, their famiUar horizons, and the 
very material of the places 
where they pass their lives 
and whence their hope is 
bom. The priest can make 
his house of the dogma, 
which the desire of men has 
materialized. He can in- 
sure his power by install- 
ing the god in the smallest, 
darkest, most secret retreat 
of the edifice. The wor- 
shiper will accept it, if he 
recognizes the visible face 
of his accustomed existence 
in the thousands of other 
mute gods that border the 
rigid avenues leading to the 
giant pylons, that people 
the courts and the porticos, 
and that are men mingled 
with the monsters of the 
oasis and the desert, lions, 
rams, jackals, cynocephali, 
and hawks. Amid the thick 
columns, laid low to-day by 
conquerors and covered by 

the waters and by sand, or 

• ■11 I-».- .L t -111 Middle Empire (xvi Ct'iitury 

still lifting the formidable i. ,-. ^ t-, , i a ■ 

^ li.C.)- The bearer of ofTonngs 

dlscloated skeletons of the (Louvre). 



42 ANCIENT ART 

hypo-style halls high above the desert, he will find him- 
self. He will recognize his monotonous palm groves, his 
strange woods, his thickets with open spaces, the 
straight, thickset trunks of his trees with heavy crowns 



New Empire (xv Century B.C.). The herd, mural j^aintiiig 
from Thebes {BrUish Mvaeiim). 

and opulent, pulpy fiber, crushed between the hardened 
mud of the ground and the vertical rays of the sun. 
The columns have the gathered thrust, the rough- 
grained roundness of the palm trees and the short, 
flattened surface of their tops. Leaves of lotus 
assembled into bouquets, leaves of tlie papyrus, 
palms, and rows of dates swell the capitals with the 
compact and powerful life of tropical vegetation. On 
looking beneath his feet he will see again the water 
lilies, the lotus, the heavy plants, the flora of the 
fecund river where moor hens and ducks thrive, as 
well as fish and crocodiles; he will perceive the lizards, 



EGYPT 43 

the snakes, the urseus that warms itself on the hot 
sand where the red-brown elytra of the scarabs sow 
bits of metal. And when he raises his eyes it will be 
to divine, below the familiar constellations that sow 
the blue space, the birds of the solitudes, the slender 



New Empire (xv Century B.C.). The ))ir<ls, mural painting 
from Thebes {Britùh Museum). 

ibis, the vulture, the symbolic hawk suspended on 
rigid wings between the sky and the desert. Every- 
where, on the heights of walls, columns, obelisks, 
everywhere — living script will flower for the joy of 
his senses, in painted bas-relief, in hieroglyphic inscrip- 
tions. Its opaque emeralds and its somber turquoises, 
its burnt reds, its sulphur, and its gold will repeat 



44 ANCIENT ART 

to him the science, the literature, and the history 
which his ancestors were so long in making with their 
blood, their bones, their love, their memory, and the 
fearful or charming forms which accompanied them. 

Entrenched behind this format language, the priest 
may surround his action with a mystery by which he 



New Empire (xv Century B.C.) Colossal head of Anienolhes 
m (Louvre). 

profits. He knows mnch. He knows the move- 
ments of the heavens. He arranges his temple as an 
observatory, protected by lightning conductors. He 
possesses the great principles of geometrj- and trian- 
gulation. But his .science is secret. All that these 
people know of it is revealed by certain tricks of 



EGYPT 45 

spiritualism and of magic which mask the sometimes 
puerile itnd often profound meaning of the occult 
philosophy which the hieroglyphs and the syiidiolic 
figures are meant to eternalize 
on the face of the desert. 

The Pharaoh, the human 
form of Osiris, is the instru- 
ment of the theocratic caste — 
which overwhelms him with 
power so as to domesticate 
him. Below it and him, with 
some intermediaries, officers, 
chiefs of cities or of villages, 
governors armed with their 
batons, is the multitude. For 
a few hours of repose in the 
burning night, on the ground 
of hardened mud, for bread 

and water, they have nothing jj^^ empire. Hawk 
but the life of the enslaved (Louvre). 

plowman or reaper, mason or 

stonecutter — forced labor and blows. A hundred gen- 
erations are used up to build the pyramids, men are 
broken at tasks beyond the strength of man, women are 
deformed before their age because they have been too 
miserable and have borne too many children, children 
are turned aside and warped before birth under the 
weight of a servitude centuries old. A frightful night- 
mare. In the far background there is the bare hope 
of future metamorphoses, a troubled and flickering 
light for the poor man who will have no tomb. 



46 ANCIENT ART 

How is it that, in this hell, the Egyptian did not 
seek and find the dangerous consolation of absolute 
spiritualism? The living desire is stronger than 
death. Naturalistic and polytheistic from its origin, 
his religion retained the love of the form upon which 
we base our hope. His statues gave to mystery an 
indestructible skeleton, and he never adored his gods 
save under animal or human forms. The surround- 
ings in which he had to live did not permit him to 
become absorbed in unrestrained contemplation. The 
daily struggle for bread is the surest of positivist 
educations. As a matter of fact, nature is ungrateful 
in Egypt. It is only by incessant effort and thanks 
to resources constantly renewed, in their ingenuity 
and courage, that the Egyptian learned to utilize to 
his profit the periodical excesses of the Nile. He had 
to put into practice a study, centuries old, of the 
habits of the river, of the consistency and the qual- 
ities of the mud; he had to undertake formidable 
works, dikes, embankments, artificial lakes, irrigating 
canals, the cutting of sandstone and of granite; he 
had to continue these works ceaselessly and begin 
them again to prevent them from being buried under 
the deposits of the river, from being swallowed up 
and disappearing. The pyramids reveal the incom- 
parable power of his engineers. And if the hardness 
of his life turned his mind toward death, at least 
during his passage over the earth he left the impress 
of a profound genius for geometry. 

A strange people, expressing, in theorems of basalt, 
the most vast, the most secret, the most vague aspira- 



EGYPT 47 

tions of its inner world ! The spirit of Kgypt is abso- 
lute and somnolent like the colossuses stretched out 
on the stone of its tombs. And yet, outside of the 
mystery of ever-renewing life, forever like itself in 
all epochs, under all skies, there is nothing that is not 



New ËMfiRE. Ihis, bronze statuette [Limvre). 

human and accessible to our emotion in the radiant 
silence which seems to well up from these motionless 
figures with their definite planes. The Egyptian 
artist is a workman, a slave who works under the 
baton like the others; he is not initiated into the 
mystic sciences. We know a thousand names of kings, 
of priests, of war chiefs, and of city chiefs; we do not 



48 ANCIENT ART 

know one name of those who have expressed the real 
thought of Egypt, that which lives forever in the 
stone of the tombs. Art was the anonvmous voice, 
the mute voice of the crowd, ground down and observ- 
ing within itself the tremor of the mind and of hope. 
Sustained by an irresistible sentiment of the life it 
was forbidden to spread out, it allowed that senti- 
ment to burn — with all the power of its compressed 
faith — into depth. 

It is not true — startling and illuminating as are the 
metaphysical intuitions that, with their power, the 
priestly castes pass on through time, in Egypt as in 
Chaldea — it is not true that the mysterious images 
which svmbolize these intuitions owe to them their 
beauty. With the artist, instinct is at the beginning 
of everything. It is life, in its prodigious movement 
wherein matter and mind merge without his thinking 
of disuniting them, that lights the spark in him and 
directs his hand. It is for us to disengage from the 
work of art its general signification as we disengage it 
from sensuous, social, and moral life, which it sums 
up for us in a flash. The Egyptian artist followed 
certain ideas, more often restrictive than active, which 
the priest dictated to him. ^\^len the priest demanded 
that a lion with a human head be cut in granite^ or 
a man with the head of an eagle and open hands 
through which the flame of the spirit seemed to pass 
into the world, he jealously kept to himself the occult 
meaning of the form and the gestures, and the sculptor 
drew the enthusiasm which made the material quiver 
from the material alone and from the faith he had in 



New Empire (xiv Century B.C.). Sekhmet (Louvre.) 



50 ANCIENT ART 

the myths he animated. If the monster was beauti- 
ful, it was because the sculptor was living. The 
profound occultist counted for nothing in it, the naive 
artist for everything. 

We know really only what we have learned by our- 
selves, and personal discovery is our sole source of 
enthusiasm. The highest generalizations have started 
with the most obscure and strongest sentiment, to 
purify themselves step by step as they rise to intelli- 
gence. They are open to the artist who must, logically 
and fatally, take his course toward them. But the 
faculty of giving life to the language in which phil- 
osophers communicate these generalizations to us is 
not logically and fatally imparted to the intellectual. 
The generalization is never a point of departure, it 
is a tendency; and if the artist had begun with occult- 
ism, his work would have been condemned to the 
stiffness of death. Now, even when stiff as a cadaver, 
by the will of the priest, the Egyptian statue lives 
through the love of the sculptor. Only human evolu- ' 
tion proceeds in a block, and the instinct of the artist 
accords with the mind of the philosopher in order to 
give to their abstract or concrete creations the same 
rhythm which expresses a general need felt in common. 



Ill 



However that may be, it was the crowd and nothing 
but the crowd which spread over the wood of the 
sarcophagi and over the compact tissue of the hypogées, 
the pure, living, colorful flowers of its soul. It whis- 



EGYPT SI 

pered its life in the deep shadows so that that life 
should shiue iu the light of our torches when we open 
the hidden sepulchers. The fine tomb was dug out 
for the king or the rich man, it is true, and his was the 
hixurioiis existence to be traced on the walls, in funeral 



New Empire. Great temple of Thebes. 

processions, in adventures of war or of hunting or in 
the work of the fields. He was to be shown surrounded 
bj' his slaves, by bis farm workers, by his familiar 
animals; it was necessary to tell how bis bread was 
made, how his beasts were cut up by the butcher, how 
his fish were caught, how his birds were captured, how 
his fruits were offered him, and how his wives made 
their toilet. And the crowd of artisans worked iu 
obscurity; they thought to tell the charm, the power, 
the happiness, the opulence, and the life of the master; 



52 ANC lENT ART 

they told, above all, their misery, but also their fecund 
activity, utility, intelligence^, inner wealth, and the 
furtive grace of their own life. 

What marvelous painting! It is freer than the 
statuary, which is intended almost solely to render 
the image of the god or the deceased. Despite its 
abstract grand style it is familiar, it is intimate; some- 
times it turns to caricature; always it is malicious or 
tender, like this naturally human and good people, 
which is crushed little by little by theocratic force, 
and which descends into itself to consider its humble 
life. In the modern sense of the word there is no 
science of composition, no sense of perspective. Egyp- 
tian drawing is a writing that must be learned. But 
let one know it well, with its silhouettes whose heads 
and legs are always in profile while their shoulders 
and breasts are always in front view, and then see 
how all these stiff silhouettes move, with what ingen- 
uousness they live, how their silence is peopled with 
animation and murmur! An extremely well-organized 
plan, sure, decisive, precise, but quivering. When 
the form appears, especially the nude form, or as it 
is divined through a transparent shirt, the artist 
suspends his whole life in it, that nothing but a light 
of the spirit may shine from his heart, one which shall 
illumine only the highest summits of memory and of 
sensation. Truly, that continuous contour, that 
single undulating line, so pure, so nobly sensual, which 
evinces so discreet and strong a sense of character, of 
mass, and of movement, has the appearance of being 
traced in the granite by the intelligence alone, without 



New Empire (xiv Century B.C.)- Portrait of a v 
(Florence, Archœlogkal Museum). 



M ANCIENT ART 

the lielp of a tool. Then come streaming the deep 
blues, emeralds, ochres, golden yellows, and vermilions 
— lightly, never thickly applied. It is like perfectly 



New Empire (xiv Century B.C.). A princess, stone {Berlin 
Museum). After an illustration in Die Plaatik der MgypUr. 

clear water into which one would let fall, without 
stirring it by a tremor, unchangeable colors: they 
do not muddy it, but let the plants and pebbles at 
the bottom be seen. 



New Emfibii:. Temple of Touthmes III at Karnak. 



56 ANCIENT ART 

The intensity of the sentiment, the logic of the 
structure break the chains of hieratism and the impulse 
to style. These trees, these stiff flowers, this whole 
conventional world has the heavy movement of the 
fruitful seasons, of the seed as it returns to life. 

* Egyptian art is perhaps the most impersonal that 
exists. The artist effaces himself. But he has such 
an innate sense of life, a sense so directly moved and 
so limpid that everything of life which he describes 
seems defined by that sense, to issue from the natural 
gesture, from the exact attitude, in which one no 
longer sees stiffness. His impersonality resembles 
that of the grasses which tremble at the level of the 
ground or of the trees bowing in the wind with a single 
movement and without resistance, or that of the water 
which wrinkles into equal circles all moving in the 
same direction. The artist is a plant that gives fruits 
similar to those of other plants, and as full of savor 
and of nourishment. And the convention which 
dogma imposes upon him is not apparent, because that 
which issues from his being is animated by the very 
life of his being, healthy and swelling with juice as a 
product of the soil. 

^ What he recounts is his life itself. The workmen 
with their tanned skin, their muscular shoulders, 
nervous arms, and hard skulls work wholeheartedly, 
even when the rod is used; their faces remain gentle 
— the smooth-shaven faces with thé prominent cheeks; 
and it is not without a kind of fraternal irony that the 
artisan decorator or statue maker, who has represented 
himself so often, shows them busy at their task, rowers 



EGYFr 57 

sweating, butchers cutting and sawing, masons assemb- 
ling bricks of baked mud, herdsmen leading their 
passive beasts or delivering- the females, fishermen,' 
hunters, jovial farmhands holding up frantic ducks 



New Empire (xiii Century B.C.). Temple of Ibsamboul. 

by the tips of their wings and squirming rabbits by 
their ears, cramming fat geese, carrying cranes in their 
arms and holding their beaks closed with a firm fist 
so as to prevent them from screaming. We see the 
rearing of the heads, the ambling or mincing gaits, 
hear the bleating, the bellowing, and the sound of 
wings. The domestic animals — the oxen, asses, dogs, 
and cats— have their massive or peaceful or joyous 
or supple look, their unceasing rumination, the tremor 
of the skin or of their ears, their undulation as they 



58 ANCIENT ART 

creep, and the silence and surety with which they 
stretch their paws. The panthers walk as if on vel- 
vet, pushing out their flat heads. The ducks and 
geese waddle, digging and quacking with their flat 
bills. The stupid fish gape in the drawn nets; the 
trembling water is transparent, and the women who 
come to dip it up in their jars or the animals who 
plunge into it are saturated with its coolness. Oranges 
and dates have their weight in baskets which are held 
up b^' arms as pure as the stem of a young plant, and 
which are balanced like flowers. The women, when 
they bedeck themselves or moisten their slim brushes 
to rouge their mistresses, have the air of reeds bending 
down to the dew in the grass. The world has the 
silent shudder of the morning. 

This natural poetry, fundamentally ardent and 
familiar, is carried by the Egyptians into everything 
that comes from their fingers — into their jewels, their 
little intimate sculpture, those innumerable knick- 
knacks which encumber their sepulchers, where they 
follow the dead person to whom they had belonged. 
And it is in the domestic objects of the kitchen and the 
workshop. All their fauna, all their flora live again 
there with that same very sensual and very chaste 
sentiment; all is motionless and alive; and all has 
the same profundity. Whatever their material — 
bronze or wood, ivory, gold, silver, or granite — they 
preserved, in the matter wrought, its weight and its 
delicacy, its freshness if of the vegetable world, its 
grain if a mineral. Thieir spoons resemble leaves 
abandoned at the water's e4ge; their jewels, cut into 



' Empire (xiv Century B.C.). Hypostyle Hall of Kani&k 



60 ANCIENT ART 

the shapes of hawks, reptiles, and scarabs, have the 
look of those colored stones that one picks up in the 
bed of rivers, on the seashore and in the neighborhood 
of volcanoes. Underground Egypt is a strange mine. 
It breeds living fossils which are like the crystallization 
of organic multitudes. 



IV 

But all the intimacv, all the furtive charm of its 
spirit is hidden there, like the fellah in his mud warren, 
far from the palaces and the temples. On the surface 
of the soil we get the philosophic Egypt. Only under 
the Ancient Empire, five or six thousand years ago, 
the Memphite school of sculpture essayed an expres- 
sion ,of every-day existence. Egypt remembered old 
epochs of liberty, perhaps, before the sphinx himself, 
epochs of which we shall some day find traces under 
ten thousand years of alluvial deposits, lower than 
the foundations of the pyramids. Art, moreover, is 
always realistic at its beginnings. It does not yet 
know how to form those synthetic images, made up 
of the thousands of forms encountered on the long 
ascending road toward civilization, which art tries 
to realize as soon as it gets to the threshold of the 
general idea. Primitive man is almost solely con-/ 
cerned with his own life. Certainly he makes his 
attempt at résumés of sensations, but at résumés of 
things before his eyes, not of those which pass beyond 
the vision of the moment. It is in order to charac- 
terize well visible forms that he leaves nothing of them 



EGYPT 61 

but the summits of their undulations and of their 
expressive projections. The "Seated Scribe," which 
is of that ancient epoch, is of a terrifying truthfuhiess, 
in the man's direct application to the task he accom- 



New Empike (xiii Century). Sarcophagus of Rameses III, 
detail (Loutre). , 

plishes. He is not yet a tjpe of average humanity; 
he is already the average type of a profession and a 
caste. His attention to his work, his suspended energy, 
that arrested life which makes his face flame like a 



62 ANCIENT ART 

torch and that animates his fixed body are due to the 
planes which define him, and to the trenchant mind, 
free of disquietude, of the man who cut them. Of 
the same period are the peasants who march stick in 
hand, the men and women who start, side by side on 
the voyage of death, as they embarked on the voyage 
of life. 

The Egyptian of that time possessed the equilibrium 
of his functions. Each wheel of the social machine 
acted, at that moment, with a vigor and an automatism 
which marked a life that was spontaneously disciplined, 
but free to define itself. 

The classic sculpture came into existence only under 
the Middle Empire when Thebes had dethroned 
Memphis. From that moment and until the end of 
the world of the Nile, it was scarcely more than funer- 
ary and religious: statues of gods and statues of 
doubles. The story of the harvest, of the active work 
of the men and animals of the plow, of boudoir and 
household cares, of the adventures of every-day life, 
was left to painting and to the workmen of art. The 
sculptor of the gods was indeed a -workman too, but 
he was raised, by the impK)rtance of his task and the 
strength of his faith, well above his misery. One 
might say that he had turned his back on the oasis, 
that he contemplated only the regularity of the days 
and the years, the sleeping and the awakening of the 
seasons, of the river, the sad desert, the impassible 
face of the sky. 

We must not be too greatly surprised at seeing him 
thus different from the man who gave that account 



EGYPT 63 

of tlie scribe with so much passionate attention. From 
i^^r'Ëgyptian art seems changeless and forever like 
itself. From near by, it offers, like that of all the 
other peoples, the spectacle of great evolutions, of 
progress toward freedom of 
expression, of researches in 
imposed hieratisni. Egypt 
is so far from us that it all 
seems on the same plane. 
One forgets that there are 
fifteen or twenty centuries, 
the age of Christianity — 
between the "Seated 
Scribe" and the great 
classic period, twenty-five 
or thirty centuries, fifty, 
perhaps — twice the time 
that separates us from 
Pericles and Phidias — be- 
tween the pyramids and 

the Saite school, the last 

>• • -r , ,- r ,1 New Empire. Woman seated, 

living manifestation of the . . , .. ,r \ 

^* bronze statuette (Louvre). 

Egyptial ideal. 

The arresting of Egyptian sculpture in the move- 
ment of free discovery, sketched with so much vigor 
by the Memphite school, was doubtless provoked by 
a long historical preparation whose elements are too 
little known for us to define them with sufficient pre- 
cision. " The Ancient Empire was peaceful. The 
Theban Empire is warlike. It draws its authority 
more directly from the priestly caste, in order to retain 



; 



64 ANCIENT ART 

the obedience of the industrious and gentle people 
whom it wanted to use in its ambition for conquest. 
The theological mystery becomes denser. Dogma, 
growing more fixed, limits the flight of sculpture and, 
by imposing limits upon it, condemns it to research 
of a restricted type, which will narrow it more and 
more. It becomes the religious expression of a people 
of engineers. The statues will define the permanent 
aspect of Egypt, arrest life between regular dikes, 
cause the world to begin and end with them as the 
cultivated land ends and the desert begins with the 
limit of the river mud.^ Egyptian sculpture becomes 
a changeless architectonic frame; a century -old study 
of form, having penetrated the laws of its structure, 
has affixed this frame which will henceforth enclose 
the portrait of the god or the portrait of the deceased, 
the dwelling place of the double. Everything changes. 
Forms are bom and effaced on the surface of the 
earth as easily as figures on a blackboard. There is 
nothing changeless save the almost mathematical 
relationships which animate them, binding them 
together with the invisible chain of abstraction. The 
great sculpture of Egypt materializes that abstraction 
and formulates in granite a geometrical ideal that 
seems as durable as the laws which govern the course 
of the heavenly bodies and the rhythm of the seasons. 
Sculpture is at once the most abstract and the most 
positive of plastic expressions — positive, because it 
is impK)ssible to evade the difficulties of the task through 
verbal artifices and because the form will live only on 
condition that it be logically constructed, from what- 



EGYPT 65 

ever side one considers it; abstract, because the law 
of that construction is revealed to us only by a series 
of more and more generalized mental operations. 



New Empire. Spoons for rouge (towwe). 

Before it was an art, sculpture was a science, and no 
sculptor can produce durable work if he has not found 
the generating elements of it in Nature herself. Now 
it was the Egyptians who taught us that, and it is 



66 ANCIENT ART 

perhaps not possible to understand and to love sculp- 
ture if one has not first undergone the severe educa- 
tion they afford us. 

The head of their statues remains a portrait, to 
which style is given by the subordination of its char- 
acteristics to a few decisive planes, but the body is 
molded in a canon of architectural science which will 
not be reached again. One foot is in front of the other 
or beside it; the statue, almost always crowned with 
the pschent, is half nude, standing with the arms 
glued to the sides or seated, the elbows at the thorax, 
the hands on the knees, the face looking straight 
ahead, the eyes fixed. It is forbidden to open its lips, 
forbidden to make a gesture, forbidden to turn its 
head, to arise, to leave its pedestal in order to mingle 
with living beings. One would say that it was tied 
down with bands. But yet it bears within it, in its 
visage, where thought wanders with the light, and 
in its immobilized body, the whole life spread out on 
the walls of the tombs, the bursting life of the shad- 
ows. A wave runs through it, a subterranean wave, 
whose sound is stifled. The statue's profiles have the 
sureness of an equation of stone and a sentiment so 
vast that everything of which we are in ignorance 
seems to reside in it silently. It will never tell its 
secret. The priest has enchained its arms and its 
legs, sewn up its mouth with mystic formulas. Egypt 
will not attain the philosophic equilibrium — that 
sense of the relative which gives us the sense of the 
measure of our action and, in revealing to us our true 
relationships with things in their ensemble, assigns 



EGYPT 67 

to us, in the harmony of the universe, the role of 
conscious center of the order which it imposes on us. 
She will not know the freedom toward which she was 
tending in the perif"' '' 
Memphis, and whicl 
painters suspect as 
grope about in the i 
ness of the tombs, 
priest forbids her t( 
mand of the conf 
movement of natur 
agreement betweei 
science and the aspira 
of sentiment which sh 
not repress and ^ 
shine from the basa 
from an arrested sun 
Master of the soul, 
least holding by the 
the hand that expi 
it, the priest permit 
things to the king, 
who permits all 
things to the priest. 
From the beginning 

of the Middle Em- ^ „ „ i < r __ i 

Saite Epoch. Horus, bronze [Loujrre). 
pire to the end of 

the New, Egypt returns to the spirit that erected the 

pyramids. She will cover herself with giant temples 

and with eolossuses, Ibsamboul. Luxor, Kamak, 

Ramesseum, Memnon, piles of stone, walls, pylons. 



68 ANCIENT ART 

statues of disproportionate size, sphinxes, mill wheels 
of stone under which the king in his pride grinds the 
multitude which, in turn, is consoled by its pride' in 
making gods. At this moment everything is possible 
to the sculptor-geometer. One does not know whether 
he cuts the rocks into colossuses or whether he gives 
to the colossuses the appearance of rocks. He p)ene- 
trates into hills of granite, scoops out immense halls 
there, covers them from top to bottom with immense 
bas-reliefs and painted hieroglyphs, gives their front 
which faces the Nile the aspect of giant figures as 
decisive as the first profiles he traced — figures whose 
great pure faces stare, for three or four thousand years 
without the turn of an eyelid, at the terrible sun, 
which sculptures them with absolute shadows and 
lights. The monsters he erects as the borders of 
avenues, the monsters which tell nothing and reveal 
everything, are rigorously logical, despite their man's 
or ram's head on a lion's body. That head is attached 
naturallv to the shoulders, the muscles barelv indicated 
have their normal insertions and direction, the bones 
their necessary architecture, and from the tips of the 
claws and the silent planes of the sides, from the rump 
and the back to the round cranium and to the medi- 
tative face, the vital forces circulate with one con- 
tinuous flow. AVhen the artist cuts straight from the 
block these absolute forms whose surfaces seem deter- 
mined by geometrical volumes penetrating one another 
according to immutable laws of attraction, one would 
say that he retains, in the depth of his inexhaustible 
instinct, the remembrance of the common form from 



EGYPT 69 

which all others come: animal forms, and, beyond 
the animal forms, those of the original sphere whence 
the planets issued and whose curve was sculptured 
by the gravitation of the heavens. The artist has the 
right to create monsters if he 
can make of them beings which 
can conceivably live. Any form 
adapted to the universal condi- 
tions of life is more living, even if 
it exists only in our imagination, 
than a form based on reality but 
fulfilling its function badly. The 
dried-out cadavers, which the soil 
of Egypt will finally absorb bit 
by bit, have not the reality of 
her sphinxes and her fearful gods 
with men's bodies and the head 
of hawks and panthers, where 
the spirit has laid its spark. In 
all directions and from whatever 
point one considers them, they 
undulate like a wave. One would 
say that an insensible line of 
light turns about them, slowly 
caresses an invisible form which 
its embrace reveals, itself search- 
ing out the place— without the 
intervention of the sculptor — 
where it is to be inflected or 
where it is to insinuate itself, bare- «"te Emeu (fi70 B.C.). 

. 1>"II, Winn] (fin/wA 

ly to modulate tue undulatmg M-usmim). 



70 ANCIENT ART 

progression of the sculpture by imperceptible passages, 
as music does. 

But this definitive science will eventually destroy 
the statue maker's art. An hour arrives when the 
mind, dh*ected along a single road, can discover nothing 
more there. Doubtless the immobility of Egypt had 
never been more than an appearance. But the ideal 
of her mind^ even if she tried to define herself in new 
forms, changed but little, for the teachings of her soil 
scarcely varied and it was always with the same sur- 
roimdings that man had to reckon. And she had 
expended a prolonged effort to approach that ideal. 
It was for this reason that she had not died. She 
struggled. But the Theban empire was immobile. 
The dogma no longer moved; the social order had 
been poured into its granite mold which the monarchy 
sealed. Enthusiasm wears itself out if it recommences 
the same conquests every day. Under the Rames- 
sides, the overstrained effort of the preceding dynasties 
was disunited. Continual war with outside powers, 
invasions, and foreign influences discouraged and 
unsettled the spirit of the Egyptians. After fifteen 
centuries of uninterrupted production, the Theban 
statue maker handled his material with, too great 
facility. Occultism was, however, cultivated as much 
by the priestly classes and was thus the master that 
directed the artisan. But he had lost the power of 
action. He had lost that prodigious sense of mass 
that concentrates life in a decisive form of which all 
the surfaces seem to rejoin the infinite through their 
unlimited curves. Each year he delivered by hundreds 



EGYPT 71 

statues manufactured in quantity from the same com- 
mercial model. The school was formed. Geomet- 
rical idealism had fixed 
formula and sentiment hat 
itself through continually 
ing those unscalable wal 
which forbade it to j 
Egypt died of her need ol 



But her death was to 1 
■slow one. She was even 
have, before passing on 
to younger hands, a fii 
ening to action. With 
dynasty, about the t 
Greece emerged from the 
history, she profited by tht 
of Assyria and that of t 
organization of the Met 
power, to recover courai 
of her re-established secu 
more she looked about hi 
herself, and discovered 
soul — infused with 
freshness by the con- 
fused presentiment of a 
new ideal — a supreme 

Bower, as warm as an g^^^ ^^^ (j„^.„ K«^^ 
autumn. She cradled bronze statuette (Louvre). 



72 ANCIENT ART 

nascent Greece with a farewell song, still quite virile, 
and very gentle. 

Saite art returned to original sources. It was as 
direct as the ancient Memphite art. But it has 
almost rediscovered the science of Thebes, and if it 
seems softer than Theban art, it is because its tender- 
ness is more active. Now, we no longer find only 
funerary statues. Saite art escapes the formula; it 
produces faithful portraits, precise and nervous — 
scribes again, statuettes of women, personages seated 
on the ground, their hands crossed on their knees, at 
the height of the chin. 

Egypt did not fail to obey that consoling law which 
decrees that every society about to die from exhaustion 
or which feels itself dragged into the current of revo- 
lution, shall turn back for a moment to address a 
melancholy farewell to woman, to her indestructible 
power which society, in the course of its vigorous 
youth, has usually misunderstood. Societies rising 
in full flight are too idealistic, too much concerned 
with the conquest and the assimilation of the universe, 
to look in the direction of the hearth they are abandon- 
ing. It is only on the other slope of life that they 
look backward to bow their wiser or more discouraged 
enthusiasm before the force that conserves while every- 
thing around it wearies, droops and dies — ^beliefs, 
illusions which are presentiments, and civilizing energy. 
Egypt at her decline caressed the body of woman 
with that sort of chaste passion which only Greece 
knew afterward, and which Greece perhaps did not 
express so religiously. Feminine forms, sheathed in 



Saite Epoch (vi Century B.C.)- Seated 
persunage, bnmzc (Loupre). 



74 ANCIENT ART 

a clinging material, have tliat pure lyrism of young 
plants that reach up to drink the daylight. The silent 
passage from the slim round arms to the shoulders, to 
the ripening breast, to the waist, to the belly, to the 
long, tapering legs, and to the narrow, bare feet has the 
freshness and the quivering firmness of flowers not 



Ptolemaic Empire (i Century B.C.). Temple of Denderah. 

yet opened. The caress of the chisel passes and slips 
over the forms like lips brushing a closed corolla which 
they would not dare to press. Man, grown tender, 
gives himself to her whom till then he had thought 
only to take. 

In these last works Egypt confides to us her most 
intimate thought about the young women and the 
men seated like the boundarj' marks of roads. Every- 
thing is a restrained caress, a veiled desire to penetrate 
universal life before Egypt abandoned herself unre- 
sistingly to its current. As a musician hears harmony, 
the sculptor sees the fluid of light and shade that makes 



EGYPT 75 

the continuous world by passing from one form to 
another. Discreetly he joins the projections that are 
barely indicated by the long, rhythmic planes of the 
thin garment which has not a single fold. The model- 



ProLEMAtc Empire (i Century B.C.). Temple of Dcnderali, 
baa-relief. 



ing passes like water, over the most compact mate- 
rials. Its wave flows between the absolute lines of a 
geometry in movement, it has the balanced undula- 
tions that one would call eternal, like the movement 
of the sea. Space continues the block of basalt or of 
bronze by taking up from its surface the confused 
illumination that arises from its depths. The mind 
of dying Egypt tries to gather together the general 



76 ANCIENT ART 

^ energy dispersed through the universe, that it may 
transmit it to men to come. 

And that is all. The walls of stone that inclosed 
the soul of Egypt are broken by invasion, which 
recommences and finds her at the end of her strength. 
Her whole inner life runs out of the open wound. 
Cambyses may overturn her colossuses; Egypt cannot 
offer a virile protest; her revolts are only on the sur- 
face and accentuate her decline. AATien the Macedo- 
nian comes, she willingly includes him among her gods, 
and the oracle of Amnion finds it easy to promise him 
victory. In the brilliant Alexandrian epoch her per- 
sonal effort was practically nil. It Was the Greek 
sages and the apostles of Judea who came to drink at 
her spring, now almost dried up, but still full of deep 
mirages, that they might try, in the unsettled world, 
to forge from the debris of the old religions and the 
old sciences a new weapon for the idea. She saw, 
with an indifferent eye, the dilettante from Hellas 
visiting and describing her monuments, and the 
Roman parvenu raising them again. She let the 
sand mount up around the temples, the mud fill the 
canals and bury the dikes, and the weariness of life 
slowly covered up her heart. She did not disclose the 
true depth of her soul. She had lived inclosed^ çhe 
remained inclosed, shut like her coffins, her temples, 
her kings, a hundred cubits high, whom she seated in 
her oasis, above the motionless wheat, their foreheads 
in the solitude of the heavens. Their hands have 
never left their knees. They refuse to speak. One 
must consider them profoundly and seek in the depth 



EGYPT 77 

of oneself the echo of their mute confidences. Then 

their somnolence is awakened confusedly. . . . The 

science of Egypt, its religion, its despair, and its need 

for eternity — that endless murmur of ten thousand 

monotonous years — the whole of it is contained in the 

sigh which the colossus of Memnon exhales at sunrise. 
6 



The Euphrates at Babylon 



Chapter III. THE ANCIENT ORIENT 



5, between the two old rivers which 
pty into the burning sea after crossing 
solitudes, there is no longer anj'thing 
re than formless hillocks, choked 
v..>.jals, and a few poor villages. The sand 
has covered up everything. Doubtless it is not much 
deeper above the Chaldean palaces which have dis- 
appeared than around the temples of the Nile which 
are still visible at its surface; and the Greeks must 
have exaggerated when they assigned two hundred 
thousand years of antiquitj' to Babylonian civiliza- 
tion. But the material of the walls was less hard and 
their abandonment bj- men more complete. And 
what, then, does it matter? The true cradle of the 
human soul is wherever we can recognize the face of 
our earliest aspiration. 



THE ANCIENT ORIENT 79 

And yet how mobile this face is! There it glows 

with the hght of an undying hearth of contemplative 

aspirations, here we see concentrated the rigorous will 

to attain the visible and practical purpose and not to 



Chaldea {xxx Century B.C.?). Lion (Louttre). 

go beyond it. The statues, which the dunes covered 
in the ruins of Tello, bear witness to a mind infinitely 
more positive, if not more sure of itself, than ever the 
Egyptian mind was, even at the time of the ** Seated 
Scribe," their contemporary by a margin of a few 
centuries; and in the old Orient centuries count no 
more than years. Egypt had probablj' built the 
Pyramids by then, and had given the Sphinx's visage 
to a rock; the next age was to plunge her still deeper 
into mystery and turn her gaze inward more and mor(>. 
The statues of Tello are neither gods nor symbols; 
they have nothing mysterious about them but their 



80 ANCIENT ART 

antiquity and that silence which haunts the old stones 
found amid the relics of life beneath the ground. Here 
is the image of a builder-prince, a rule across his knees. 
As in Egypt, it is true, these decapitated bodies are 
stiff; rigid planes cut them into rectangular figures, 
and the limbs remain at rest; but the shoulders have 



Chaldea. Archaic figures (Briliik Museum). 

a terrible squareness, and the hands, instead of repos- 
ing on the thighs in the abandon of thought, are joined 
and strongly clasped, as if to indicate the articulation 
of the bones, the moving relief of the muscles, the folds 
and the rough grain of the skin. Two heads found 
near them have the same energy. One would fhink 
they wore natural rocks that had been rolled by the 
waters, such is their compactness, their coherence, 
their sustained roundness. 

In facial feature primitive Mesopotamia was, how- 
ever, the sister of the plain of the Nile. The Tigris 



THE ANCIENT ORIENT 81 

and the Euphrates, whose alluvial deposits nourish 
Mesopotamia, penetrate the country through hundreds 
of canals which cross one another around the culti- 
vated fields. Covered with palm trees and date trees, 



Chaldea (XXX Century B.C.?). Paluc* of Ttllo, 
heiui. stune (Louvre). 

with fields of wheat and barley, always at its harvest 
time, always at its seed time, Mesopotamia was the 
Eden of the Biblical legends, the granary of western 
Asia, to which its caravans and its rivers brought fruits 
and bread. By way of the Persian Gulf it launched 
its fleets on the sea. But renewing its strength from 
the tribes which descended from the high plateaus. 



82 ANCIENT ART 

communicating by its rivers connected with the 
oceans of the south, with Armenia and with Syria 
which bounds the European Sea, surrounded by more 
advanced and more accessible peoples, it remained 
less shut in than Egypt, and did not, like the latter, 
consume itself at its own flame. To the east it made 
fecund the Medo-Persian Empires, and through them 
penetrated into India and even into China. To the 
north it extended itself through Assyria until the dawn 
of the modern civilizations. To the west it awakened 
Phoenicia, which opened the route from Mesopota- 
mia to the vallev of the Nile and to the world of the 
archipelago. ' 

Finally, the Chaldean theocracy probably adhered 
more closely to primitive instincts than the priestly 
caste did that governed the people of the Nile. It 
was in Chaldea that astronomy was born, to which 
her engineers of hydraulics and her architects added 
the unerring instruments of geometry and mechanics. 
It was during her brilliant nights, when the earth pro- 
longs its glow, which is due to the cloudless sky and 
the flatness of the land, that the shepherds of the 
earliest times, as well as those who came later to seek 
the coolness of the upper terraces, had observed in 
the clear sky the turning of the constellations. The 
positivistic education of the Egyptians aimed at more 
material needs and, because of this, left untouched the 
source of the great moral intuitions to which the 
people turned for a consolation, and which the Chal- 
dean people, less harshly governed, interpreted in 
terms of navigation and trade, while the king-priests 



Chaldea (xxx Century B.C.?). Statue o( Goudea 
(Louvre). 



84 ANCIENT ART 

of Babylon interpreted it in the higher serenity which 
conies with the contemplation of the movements of 
the heavenly bodies. 
Before the time of those powerful statues, which 
seem to foretell the 
end of this people's 
evolution and which 
are certainly the final 
flower of a culture cen- 
turies old, Chaldean 
art is almost an entire 
mystery. Its baked 
clay, less hard than 
the granite of the val- 
. ley of the Nile or the 
marble of Pentelicus, 
has turned to dust; 
nothing is left but 
some sunken founda- 
tions. Only stone, 
which is scarce in 
Mesopotamia, can 
resist under the tide 
of earth that gnaws 
Assyria (ix Century B.C.)- Genius and corrodes like water 
with the head of an eagle, bas-relief and ends by reclaim- 



(toutre). 



ing everything. Prom 



Assyro-Chaldean positivism to Egyptian idealism 
we find the distance which separates the consistency 
of baked clay from that of granite. Between the 
soil of the country and the intelligence of men, there 



THE ANCIENT ORIENT 85 

have always been such close analogies which we find 
are logical and necessary as soon as we understand 
that the mind invents nothing — discovers everything. 
We see, therefore, that a material which endures ought 
to give it the idea of permanence, and that a material 



AssïRiA (viii Century B.C.)- Decoration of a door of 
Nimrod, bas-relief (Louvre). 

which crumbles should give it the idea of fragility and 
of the practical utilization of the instruments it can 
furnish. Thus, also, a sky whose mathematical revo- 
lutions have been scrutinized gives the idea of conse- 
crating the precise means which it ofTers for mapping 
it out. 

And so has disappeared the very skeleton of those 
monstrous cities which sheltered the most active 
peoples of the ancient world, and the most practical. 



86 ANCIENT ART 

in the modern sense of the word. Where Babylon 
rose there is nothing but palm groves on some ves- 
tiges of city walls, around which the sand heaps up. 
None the less, on the two banks of the Euphrates, 
Babylon encircled its multitudes in a belt of walls 
twenty-five leagues in length, ninety feet in thickness, 
bristling with two hundred and fifty towers and 
studded with gates of bronze. Built of bricks and 
bitumen, with its city walls, palaces, temples, houses, 
street pavements, the banks of its canals, its reser- 
voirs, the bridges and quays of the river — uniform, 
dull, and reddish in color, here and there touched with 
enamel, the city of Semiramis lifted toward the heavens 
its monotonous buildings, almost solid blocks with 
gardens on their terraces, thus resembling the Iranian 
foothills, which are bare as far up as the cool plateaus, 
where forests and flowers grow. Above these arti- 
ficial woods were towers, made up of stages built one 
upon the other. The plains call for gigantic con- 
structions from which they can be surveyed from afar 
and commanded, and which shall be infinite like them- 
selves. The tower of Babel was never to be finished 
and, as if to explore the ocean of the stars from nearer 
by, the temple of Baal rose to a height of two hundred 
meters. 

The tower of Babel is now jsl formless hill which the 
desert is absorbing little by little. Apart from the 
seals of hard stone which continued to be produced 
during the whole civilization of Nineveh, there is 
perhaps no longer much that is solid under the sand, 
and it is possible that Chaldea has nothing more to 



THE ANCIENT ORIENT 87 

reveal to us. The sand still gives up, at times. One of 
those cuneiform inscriptions which are the most 
ancient writing known, and by which the Chaldeans 



Abstria {vm Century B.C.). King fighting, bas-relief 
{BrilUh Musewi). 

wrote their legal documents, their acts of purchase 
and of sale, the great events of their history, the recital 
of the deluge — history and legend intermingled. The 
few bas-reliefs of Tello must have been an exception 
in the industry of the time. The desert is too bare 
to inspire in man the desire for multiple forms and 
luxuriant decoration. It needs, rather, the outer life 
of the Assyrians with their wars and hunts, to bring 
about a more prolonged contact with living forms. 
But it brings about nothing which is not strongly 
indicated in the bas-relief of Tello, where vultures 



88 ANCIENT ART 

carry oflF in their claws and tear with their beaks strips 
of human bodies, and in the dense black statues with 
prominent muscles. 

II 

The art of northern Mesopotamia inherits from 
Babylonian art just as Ninevite civilization did from 
Chaldean society. The language which its artists 
speak is about the same, for the soil, the sky, and the 
men are not very different. Only, with the transfor- 
mation of the social order and the conditions of life, 
.Chaldean positivism has become brutality. The priest- , 
savant has given place to the military chief, who has 
usurped to his profit and that of his class the tempo- 
rary command which his companions in hunting and 
in battle intrusted to him. The king, in Assyria, is 
no longer, as in Egypt, the figurehead and instrument 
of the priest; he is the Sar, the temporal and spiritual 
chief, obeyed under pain of death. The Assyrian 
astronomer knows Chaldean science, to be sure, but 
his role is limited to compelling the heavenly bodies 
to voice the desires and interests of his master. Chal- 
dean star worship, an essentially naturalistic and 
positivistic religion, has been transformed with the 
social state. The symbols have been personified just 
as political power was; the sun, the planets, and fire 
are now real beings — terrible devourers of men, and 
the Sar is their armed hand. 

This Sar is saturated with hereditary vices, deformed, 
before he comes to reign, by an autocracy centuries 
old. He is developed in a frightful solitude by a 



Abstbia (Till CMitiirv- B.C.)- Officer, has-relief (Louvre). 



90 ANCIENT ART 

world of women, of eunuclis, of slaves, officers, and 
ministers. Luxury and the weight of material life 
have crushed his heart. He is a sadistic beast. He 
is enervated with ennui, with indulgence and music. 



AsBYRiA (vin Century B.C.). The fisherman, bas-relief 

{Briiwh Mvneum). 

with the smells of slaughter and of flowers. JVfen are 
burned or boiled for his gratification; he i.s shown 
living flesh which is being torn by the whip or cut by 
iron, and in which poison is producing lockjaw. His 
least impulse is expressed by an order to kill. On 
the bas-reliefs of Khorsabad and Koujoundjîk, we 
may .see him methodicallj' putting out the eyes of 
chained prisoners; we may see his soldiers bowling 
with decapitated heads. Sennacherib, Sargon, or 
Assurbanipiil orders his scribes to write on brick: 



THE ANCIENT ORIENT 9X 

"My war chariots crush men and beasts and the 
bodies of my enemies. The monuments which I 
erect are made of human corpses from which I have 
cut the heads and the limbs. I cut off the hands of 
all those whom I capture alive." 

Suffering exists in proportion to sensibility. It is 



AfiBYRIA {VIII Century B.C.)- Lioness resting, bas-relief 
{British Museum). 

possible that the Assyrian people did not feel the hor- 
ror of living, since they never felt its real joy as did 
the Egj'ptian crowds, which confided to the granite of 
the tombs the sweetness and poetrj' of their soul. 
Killing is an intoxication. By dint of seeing blood 
flow, by dint of expecting death, one ^rows to love 
blood, and everything that one does in lite smells of 
death. Massacre alwaj's; battles, and the military 
tide rising or ebbing to carrj- devastation round about 
Nineveh or to turn it back upon the surrounding 



92 ANCIENT ART 

I>eoples. Always the swarming of the nameless masses 
in putrefaction and miserjs in the poisonous vapors 
of the waters and the devouring fire of the heavens. 

When this people is not cutting throats or burning 
buildings, when it is not decimated by famine and 
butchery, it has only one function — to build and 
decorate palaces whose vertical walls shall be thick 
enough to protect the Sar, his wives, his guards, and 
his slaves — twenty or thirty thousand persons — against 
the sun, invasion, or perhaps revolt. Around the 
great central courts are the apartments covered with 
terraces or with domes, with cupolas, images of the 
absolute vault of the deserts, which the Oriental soul 
will rediscover when Islam shall have reawakened it. 
Higher than these, observatories which are at the 
same time temples, the ziguratSy the pyramidal towers 
whose stages painted with red, white, blue, brown, 
black, silver, and gold, shine afar through the veils 
of dust which the winds whirl in spirals. Especially 
at the approach of evening, the warring hordes and 
the nomadic pillagers, who see the somber confines of 
the desert streaked with this motionless lightning, 
must recoil in fear. It is the dwelling of the god, 
and resembles those steps of the plateau of Iran lead- 
ing to the roof of the world, which are striped with 
violent colors by subterranean fire and by the blaze 
of the sun. 

The gates are guarded by terrific brutes, bulls and 
lions with human heads, marching with a heavy step. 
On the whole length of the interminable walls they 
herald the drama which unrolls within — the mytho- 



THE ANXIENT ORIENT 93 

logical and living hell, the slaughter of men in war, 
the men falling from the tops of towers into the shower 
of stones and spears, kings choking lions, the bloody 
epic whose cruelty is increased by its mechanical 
expression. ITiese stiff l^s in profile, those torsos 



Assyrian Art (viii Century B.C.)- Basket, 
model in stum- {British Museum). 

seen in profile or front view, .these arms articulated 
like pincers^ — all are resisting, some killing, some 
dying. And if this life thus formed never attains that 
silent rhythm which, in Egj'pt, comnmnicates to it a 
character of such high spirituality, it gives the ferocious 
bas-reliefs of the palaces of Nineveh a force so rigorous 
as to seem to pursue its demonstration by its own 
impetus. 

It is by this burst of life, arrested in a few attitudes 
— conventional but passionately alive — that all archa- 



94 ANCIENT ART 

îsms correspond one with another. Certain writers 
have tried, by a too easy process of reasoning, to 
associate the ancient forms of art with the attempts 
of children. The Egj^ptians and the Assyrians are 
suppK)sed to have traced mere sketches of a superior 
figure, which was to be realized by the Greeks. As in 
the images made by children, it is true, the eye is seen 
in front view and very wide, illuminating a face in 
profile. It is true that the Theban or Ninevite artist 
satisfied the need for continuity, which the child also 
shares with all beings and which is the very condition 
of his logical development; he did so in following — 
untiringly and willingly — the uninterrupted line of 
the contours, the definition of the eye by the edge of 
the lids, and the profile of the face, whose plane flees 
and floats as soon as it is presented in front view. 
Bfut it is only in decorative bas-relief or in painting — 
the language of convention — that Egypt and Assyria 
reveal this inadequacy of technique — which, however, 
takes away nothing from the force of the sentiment 
and leaves intact the incomparable conception of 
mass and of evocative line. Assyrian art and Egyptian 
art represent a synthetic effort whose profundity and 
whose power of intuition are such that it is puerile to 
think childhood capable of anything similar. And 
when the Egyptian turns to his true means of expres- 
sion — sculpture — he reveals in it a science which will 
never again contain so much ardor and mystery, even 
if the social and moral preoccupations of other peoples 
animate it with a different life, indeed a freer and 
more comprehensive life. The art of the old peoples 



THE ANCIENT ORIENT 95 

develops itself within itself; it accepts the fixed limits 
of the great metaphysical systems and thus is pre- 
vented from expressing the multiple and infinitely 
complex relationships between the being in movement 
and the world ïo movement. Only political and 



AasYBiA (vin Century B.C.) The lion hunt, baa-relief 
(Briiish Mvneum). 

religious liberty will break the archaic mold, to reveal 
to man, who is already defined in his structure, his 
place in the universe. 

Assyrian society was particularly far removed from 
such preoccupations. It was interested only in adven- 
tures of war or of hunting in which the Sar was the 
hero. The walls of his palace declare his glory and 
his strength. No desire to better life, no moving ten- 
derness. When they did not celebrate a killing thej- 
showed a line of soldiers on the march to a killing. 



96 ANCIENT ART 

When the Assyrians left their burning soil to go down 
to the sea they saw nothing but the effort of the rowers, 
they leaned over the waves only to see fish seized by 
crabs. There was nothing like this in Egypt, which 
again and again took refuge in that concentration of 
mind which gives a quality of inner life and a mystery 
to its art. There is nothing like this even in Chaldea, 
where we find feminine bodies outlined in a furtive 
caress. Amid the incessant wars, the invasions, 
ruins, and griefs, the artist had not the time to look 
within him. He served his master, and without 
mental reservations. He followed him in his military 
expeditions against Chaldea, against Egypt, against 
the Hittites, and the tribes of the high plateaus. In 
his train he hunts the onager in the plains, or goes 
with him to seek the lion in the caverns of the Zagros 
Moimtains. He leads a violent life, full of movement, 
and not at all contemplative. He recounts it with 
brutality. 

Assyrian art is of a terrible simplicity. Although 
an almost flat silhouette, one that is barely shadowed 
by undulations, alone marks out the form — that form 
is bursting with life, movement, force, savage character. 
One might say that the sculptor ran a knife over the 
course of the nerves which carry the murderous energy 
to the back, the limbs, and the jaws. The bones and 
muscles stretch the skin to the breaking point. Hands 
clutch paws, close upon necks, and draw the bowstring; 
teeth tear, claws rend; the blood spouts thick and 
black. Only the human face is without movement. 
Never does one see its surface liglit up with the dull 



Assyria (viii Century B.C.). Wild beasts woiinded and 
ilcad, Ws-rclicf {lirilish Stii/feiim). 



98 ANCIENT ART 

glow of the Egyptian faces. It is altogether exterior, 
always the same — ^hard, closed, very monotonous, but 
very much characterized by its immense eyes, its 
arched nose, its thick mouth, its dead and cruel ensem- 
ble. It is meet that the king, whose head retains its 
tiara and its oiled, perfumed, and curled hair and 
beard, should be calm as he strangles or cuts the throat 
of the monster, drunk with fury. It is meet that the 
details of his costume, as well as those of his hair- 
dressing, should be minutely described. The poor 
artist has to concern himself with pitiful things. He 
flatters his master, ornaments his garments, and cares 
for his weapons and war equipment; he makes his hair 
glossy; he represents him as being impassible and 
strong in combat, larger than those who accompany 
him, dominating without effort the furious beast which 
he kills. The terrible character of the breasts, the 
legs, the arms in action, the wild animals rushing to 
the attack with muscles tense, bones cracking, or jaws 
grinding, is too often masked by the artist. 

What matter.'^ At that time when a man could not 
free himself he had to assume his share of the servi- 
tude. The Ninevite artist comprehended — that is, 
the one really accessible liberty. He was infinitely 
stronger than those whose horrible power he had the 
weakness to adore. The too elegant, the too coura- 
geous Sars with their royal ornaments and their trap- 
pings, bore us, and that is the revenge of the sculptor. 
WTiat he loved seizes us — overpowers us. Ask him 
how he saw the animals: lean horses with thin legs, 
nervous, drawn heads, with throbbing nostrils; ask 



THE ANCIENT ORIENT 99 

him to show you the growling dogs as they pull at 
their chains, or the bristling lions, or the great birds 
run through by arrows and falling among the trees. 
There he is incomparable, superior to all before and 
after him, Egyptians, ^geans, Greeks, Hindoos, 
Chinese, Japanese, the Gothic image makers, and the 



Assyria (viii Century B.C.)- The trophies of the hunt, 
bas-relief {BrilUh Museum). 

men of the Renaissance in France or in Italy. Under 
the palm trees with their rough-skinned fruits he has 
surprised the beast at rest, its muzzle resting on its 
paws as it digests the blood it has drunk. He has 
seen the beast in combat, tearing flesh, opening bellies, 
mad with hunger and rage. The forces of instinct 
circulate with bhnd violence in these contracted 
muscles, these beasts falling heavily on the prey, these 



100 ANCIENT ART 

bodies raised upright, with limbs apart and open claws, 
in these wrinkling muzzles, these irresistible springs, 
and these death struggles as ferocious as leaps or 
victories. Never will uncompromising description go 
farther. Here a lion vomits blood because his lungs 
are run through by a spear. There a lioness in fury, 
her teeth and claws out, drags toward the hunter her 
body paralyzed by the arrows that have pierced the 
marrow of her spine. They are still terrible when 
dead, lying on their backs, with their great paws falling 
idly. It is the poem of strength, of murder, and of 
hunger. 

Even when he puts aside for a day his subjects of 
battle or the chase, his orgies of murder in the horrible 
chorus of death clamors and roars, the Assyrian sculptor 
continues his poem. Almost as well as the sphinxes 
of the sacred alleys of Egypt, the violent monsters 
who guard the gates give that impression of animal 
unity which makes the strangest creations of our 
imagination re-enter the order of nature. But the 
statue maker of Nineveh is not content with fixing 
an eagle's head on the shoidders of a man, a man's 
head on the neck of a bull. The bull, the lion, the 
eagle, and the man are merged; we get the body or 
claws of a lion, the hoofs or breast of a bull, the wings 
or claws of an eagle, the hard head of a man, with his 
long hair, beard, and high tiara. Man and lion, 
eagle and bull, the being has always the potentiality 
of life; in its brutal and tense harmony it fulfills its 
symbolic function, and its violent synthesis of the 
natural forms represents to our eyes the power of 






• • • •• 

• •••• 

••••• 



THE ANCIEN'h-'CHgENT 101 






the armed animal. As in Egypt,* •iJHe: head of the 
monster is generally human — an obscure qôd jn|ignifi- 

• • • 

cent homage rendered by the man of violenbé*<o*;the 
law which man bears essentially within him, thV 1^^ .-.^ 
which says that blind force is to be overcome by the*:* •. 
force of the mind. 

Ill 

On the horizon of the ancient world this disciplined 
force was rising slowly. The peoples who received 
from Assyria the heritage of our conquests and who 
already had taken over from Iranian husbandry its 
cult of bread and the plow, the worship of fire, the 
central force of civilized life, the first philosophic 
notions of good and evil, which Ormuzd and Ahriman 
personified — the people of the mountains of the East 
were entering history with an ideal less harsh. Masters 
of the high plateaus, the Medes, after long struggles, 
had overturned the empire of the rivers, to spread 
over Asia Minor. Then Cyrus had given the hege- 
mony to the Persians, and soon all western Asia, from 
the Persian Gulf to the Euxine Sea, Syria, Egypt, 
Cyrenaica, Cyprus, and the banks of the Indus obeyed 
his successors. Only the breasts of the Greeks could 
stop the wave at Marathon. But this incessant bind- 
ing together of men and ideas had done its work. If 
the armies of the King of Kings remained subject to 
the frightful discipline which they inherited from the 
Sars of Assyria, political Persia at least left to the 
countries it had just conquered the liberty to live 
about as they pleased. The enormous Medo-Persian 



108 ..ANCl-JÊNT ART 

Empire bçcaftié-. à' kind of federal monarchy whose 
compoqï^t states, under the direction of the satraps, 
kept*'tiiêif customs and their laws. The atmosphere 



Phœnician Art. Frieze (Louvre). 

of the Oriental world became more tolerable, as was 
the case in the Occident when Rome had conquered 
it entirely. Men cultivated their fields and exchanged 
their merchandise and ideas in comparative peace. 
The attempt at a first synthesis, even, was about to 
be made among the peoples of the Levant, 



THE ANCIENT ORIENT 103 

That attempt would hardly produce a final result 
either in Egypt or in Greece. Egypt, fatigued by 
forty or sixty centuries of effort, was being swallowed 
up under the deposits of the river. Greece was too 



Hi8PANO-PH(ENictAN Art (v Centiir.v B.C.). 
H«'a(l from Elche {Louvre). 

young and too much alive not to extract a personal 
ideal of victory from all the elements that the ancient 
world intrusted to her. As to the people of Syria, 
they had already failed in various attempts which 
they had made. The Phœnicians lived only for trade. 
They were forever on the sea, or on the search for 
unknown coasts, possessed with a fever for wandering 



104 ANCIENT ART 

which was fed by their mercantile nature. Mingb'ng 
with the Mediterranean peoples whom they flooded 
with their products — textiles, vases, glassware, wrought 
metals, trinkets, statuettes hastily imitated from all 
the original nations for whom they were the agents 
and intermediaries — they had not the time to ques- 
tion their hearts. They were satisfied to serve as a 
means of exchange for the ideas of others and to 
bequeath to the world the alphabet, a positivist 
invention which the extent and complication of their 
commercial writings rendered necessary. Cyprus, the 
eternally servile, subjected to their influence, combined 
fallen Assyria with nascent Greece in heavy and 
doughlike forms wherein the force of the one and the 
intelligence of the other were reciprocally hurtful in 
the attempt to unite them. As to the Hittites, caught 
between the Egyptians and the Assyrians and pushed 
into northern Syria, they were never sufficiently mas- 
ters of themselves to seek in the outer world any 
justification of their desire to cut stone into those 
rude bas-reliefs on which remains the moral imprint 
of the conqueror. 

The Semites, through the gravity and the vigor of 
their history, might have had the ambition to pick 
up the instrument of human education which Assyria 
was letting fall — the more so since they had absorbed, 
by peaceful conquest, the populations of Mesopotamia, 
and since their race dominated from Iran to the sea. 
But their religion repudiated the cult of images. 
Their whole effort was employed in raising a single 
edifice, the house of a terrible and solitary god. And 



THE ANCIENT ORIENT 105 

that effort did not produce a final result. The Temple 
of Solomon was not worthy of that Jewish genius, so 
grandly synthetical, but closed and jealous, which 



Persia. Palace of Persepolis. 

wrote the poem of Genesis, and whose voice of iron 
has traversed the ages. 

Persia alone, mistress of the hearths of Oriental 
civilization, could — by concentrating for a final leap 
the weakening energies of the peoples she had con- 
quered^ — ^attempt a resume of the soul of antiquity, 
in the course of the two hundred years which separated 
her appearance in the world and the Macedonian 
conquest. Egypt, Assyria, and Greece — she assim- 
ilated the qualities of all. For two centuries she 
represented the Oriental spirit declining in face of the 
Occidental spirit which wiis issuing from the shadow. 



106 ANCIENT ART 

She had even the exceptional destiny not to disappear 
entirely from history and to show to changing Europe 
— now very civilized, now very barbarous — a genius 
suflSciently supple to welcome, in their turn, the ideas 
of the Hellenic world, the Latin world, the Arab 
world, the world of the Hindoos and of the Tartars; 
and yet her genius was suflSciently independent to 
emancipate her from their material domination. 

If we refer to the testimony of her most ancient 
monuments, of the period when she was trying to 
disengage a freer and less tense spirit from the force 
of Assyria, we perceive quickly that the archers of 
her processions are not so cruel, that the beasts whose 
throats are cut are not so fearful, that the monsters 
which guard the gates or support the architraves 
have a less brutal look. The hieratic spirit of con- 
quered Egypt and especially the harmonious intelli- 
gence of the lonians of the coasts and islands who 
were called in by Darius give to these feasts of death 
a character of decoration and pageantry which masks 
their ferocity. The genius of Greece, which was then 
ripening, could not endure an original form of art 
subsisting at its side. And as it could not prevent 
Persia from speaking, it denatured her words in trans- 
lating them. It is not even necessary to see the 
Assyrian monsters before looking at the figures of 
Susa in order to realize that the latter have but little 
life, that they are heraldic in their silhouette and 
rather bombastic in style. The Sassanian kings, their 
prisoners, and the great military scenes cut in the 
rock at several places in the mountain chain which 



THE ANCIENT ORIENT 107 

borders the Iranian plains and dominates the region 
of the rivers, have a far more grand and redoubtable 
appearance, despite the discernible evidence that 
Persia continued to borrow from the peoples with 



Persia (vi Centiir.v B.C.). Friew of the Archers at Siisa 

(Louvre). 

whom she fought — the Romans after the Greeks and 
Assyrians. Asia alone and Egypt have possessed 
the unshakable and gigantic faith that is needed to 
stamp the form of our sentiments and of our acts on 
these terrible natural walls against which the sun 
crushes men, or to spend three or four centuries in 
penetrating the bowels of the earth in order to deposit 
in its shade the seed of our mind. 



108 ANCIENT ART 

Amid these sculptured mountains we find the ruins 
of the great terraced palaces to which giant staircases 
lead and for the building of which Ninevite architects 
had certainly come; and we are astonished that Greek 
genius, which in the same centuries was building its 
small and pure temples, could have made itself pliable 
to the point of marrying without effort its own grace 
and this brutal display of pomp and sensuality, before 
which the serenity of the Egyptian genius bowed ever 
as did the violence of the Assyrian genius. It was, 
however, Ionian Greece that gave the elegance and 
the upward thrust to the long columns of the por- 
ticos, as she also draped the archers and gave archi- 
tectural style to the lions. It was Egypt that loaded 
their bases and necks with strong wreaths of plants — 
lotus and fat leaves that grow in the tepid water of 
the rivers. It was Assyria that crowned them with 
broad bulls affixed by the middle of the body to sup- 
port the beams on which the entablature was to be 
placed. And the palaces of Nineveh seemed to have 
piled up here their chiseled furniture with its incrus- 
tation of gold, silver, and copper, their cloths heavy 
with precious stones and those thick deep carpets, 
changeable in color and shaded like the harvests of 
the earth, opulent and vague like the Oriental soul — 
the cari>ets which Persia had not ceased to manufac- 
ture. But the decoration of the royal dwellings of 
Persepolis and of Susa is less loaded, less barbarous, 
and betokens a more refined industry and a mind 
that is humanizing. Enameled brick, with which 
the Assyrians, after the Chaldeans, had protected 



? s 

ri 



b' £ § 

I. 3 2' 



■s- 5- 
S I 
S-3 

II 



110 ANCIENT ART 

their walls against humidity, is lavished from the top 
to the bottom of the edifice, on the exterior, under 
the porticos, and in the apartments. The palace of 
the Achemenides is no longer the impenetrable fortress 
of the Sars of the north. Still imposing by its rectan- 
gular heaviness, it is lightened by its columns, which 
have the freshness of stalks swelling with water; it 
is flowered with green, blue, and yellow, brilliant as 
lacquer in the sunlight, and reflecting the glow of the 
lamps. Enamel is the glory of the Orient. It is 
stîU enamel which reflects the burning days and the 
nights of tawny pearl in the cupolas and the minarets 
of the mysterious cities sunk under the black cypresses 
and the roses. 

When Alexander reached the threshold of these 
palaces, dragging behind his war chariots all the old 
vanquished peoples, he was like the incarnate symbol 
of the ancient civilizations wandering in search of their 
disp)ersed energy. His dream of universal empire 
was to endure a shorter time than that of Cambyses 
and his successors. Union is to be realized only when 
willed by a common faith and when it tends toward 
one goal. Egypt, Chaldea, and Assyria, exhausted 
by their gigantic production, were nearing the end 
of their last winter. The Jews, in their inner soli- 
tude, were marching toward a horizon that no one 
perceived. Rome was too young to impose on the 
Orient, now grown old, that artificial harmony which^ 
three centuries later, gave it the illusion of a halt in 
its lethargic death struggle. Greece, in her skepti- 
cism, smiled at her own image. Meanwhile, the 



THE ANCIENT ORIENT 111 

Macedonian was pretending to the position of armed 
apostle of her thought, and the whole ancient world 
was under her moral ascendancy. Despite all, in 
that immense floating mass of civilizing energies which 
hesitated about their departure for a more distant 
Occident, it was still Greece that represented, in the 
face of the confused reawakening of brutal and mystical 
powers, the young ideal of reason and liberty. 



li(ic). Silver (-[ip (llililiiilheque Rationale). 



Chapter IV. THE SOT'RCES OF GREEK ART 



condition tliat we respect ruins, that 
ve do not rclmild them, that, after having 
usked their secret, we let them be recov- 
' red by the ashes of the centuries, the 

jones of the dead, the rising mass of 
waste which once was vegetations and races, the eternal 
draper;' of the foliage — their destiny may stir our 
emotion. It is through them that we touch the depths 
of our history, just a-s we are bound to the roots of 
h'fe by the griefs and sufferings which have formed us. 
A mill is painful to beliold only for the man who is 
incapable of participating by his activity in the con- 
quest of the present. 



114 ANCIENT ART 

There is no more virile luxury than that of asking 
our past griefs how they were able to determine our 
present actions. There is no more virile luxury than 
that of demanding, from the imprints of those who 
prepared our present dwelling, the why of the thing 



^GEAN Period {xix Century B.C.). 

Phœstos, vase of the reapers, steatite 

(Museum of Candia). 

that we are. A statue coming all moist out of the 
earth, a rusted jewel, or a bit of pottery bearing'the 
trace of painting is a witness which tells us much more 
about ourselves than about the bj'gone men who 
uttered this testimony. Art lives in the future. It 
is the fruit of the pain, desires, and hopes of the people, 
and the promise contained in these feelings does not 
reach its slow realization until later, in the new needs 
of the crowds; it is our emotion which tells us if the 
old presentiments of men did not deceive them. 

If we are so troubled by the rude idols, the jewels, 



THE SOURCES OF GREEK ART 115 

the vases, the pieces of bas-reliefs, and the effaced 
paintings which we have found at Knossos in Crete, 
at Tirj'nth and Mycenae in Argolis, it is precisely 



Crete (XV Century B.C.). The goddess with the 
serpenta, faïence statuette {Museum of Catidia). 

because those who left them are more mysterious to 
us than the things themselves, and because it is com- 
forting for us to realize, through these unknown beings, 



116 ANCIENT ART 

that under the variation of appearances and the 
renewal of symbols, emotion and intelligence never 
change in quality. Through the continuing action, 
even when obscure and without history, of the genera- 
tions which have formed us, the soul of the old peoples 
lives in ours. But they participate in our own adven- 
ture only if their silent spirit still animates the stone 
faces in which we recognize our eternally young desires,* 
or if we hear the sound of their passage over the earth 
in the crumbling of the temples which they raised. 
Egypt, and Chaldea itself, through Assyria and Persia 
which prolong their life till our time, cast their shadow 
at our steps. They will never seem to us very far 
away. Primitive Greece, on the contrary, which does 
not enter the world until centuries after them, retreats 
much farther back in the imagination, to the very 
morning of history. Twenty years ago we did not 
know whether the almost effaced imprints, noted here 
and there on the shores and islands of the ^Egean Sea, 
had belonged to men or to fabled shadows. It was 
necessary to hollow out the soil, to unearth the stones, 
and to cease from seeing only ourselves in them, in 
order to catch a glimpse of the phantom humanity 
which, before the time of histor\% peopled the eastern 
Mediterranean. Schliemann, who took Homer at 
his word, excavated in the plain off Argos from Tirynth 
to Mycenae. Mr. Evans entered the labvrinth of 
Minos in Crete where Theseus killed the Minotaur. 
Myth and history entangle themselves. Now the 
symbol sums uj) a hundred events of the same order; 
now the real event, representative of a whole series 



THE SOURCES OF GREEK ART 117 

of customs, ideas, and adventures, seems to us to put 
on the garb of a sj'nibolic fiction,' 

Is it the body of Agamemnon that Schhemann found, 
buried in gold, under the Agora of Mycenae, and is the 
Hissalrik of the Dar- 
danelles the Troy of 
Homer? What mat- 
ter? Between Abra- 
ham and Moses, in 
the time when Thebes 
dominated Egypt, the 
iEgean Sea was alive. 
The Phcenicians had 
advanced from island 
to island, awakening 
to the I'fe of exchange 
the tribes of fishermen 
who peopled the Cy- 
clades. Samos, Lesbos. 
Chios, Rhodes — the 
rocks sprinkled broad- 
cast in the sparkling 
sea from the moun- 
tains of Crete and of Crete (xiv Century B.C.). Jar 
the Peloponnesus to (National Museum of Athen»), 

the gulfs of Asia 

Minor, Through them the sensual and cruel spirit of 
the Orient and the .secret spirit of the peoples of the 
Nile had fertilized the waves. Danaos came from 
Egypt, Pelops from Asia, Cadmus from Phci-nicia. 

I \ictor Bérard, Le Phéniciens d l'Odi/Ksé,: 



118 ANCIENT ART 

From fishing, coast trade, the small business of one 
isle with another, from rapine and piracy, a whole 
little moving world of liailors, merchants, and corsairs 
lived their healthy life, neither a rich nor a poor one — 
a mean one^ — if we think of the vast commercial enter- 
prises and the great explorations which the Phoenicians 
undertook. Their 
feet in the water 
and their faces to 
the wind, the men 
of the iEgean would 
carry to the traf- 
fickers from Tyre 
and Sidon who had 
just entered the 
port, under blue, 
green, and red sails, 
their fish and their 
olives in vases 
painted with marine 
plants, octopuses, 

seaweed, and other 
Mycen* (xih Century B.C.). Bull's , ^ i » 

h^à,si\v^T(Kalionat Museum. Athens). ^«'•'"^ t^*^^" f""" 

the teeming, viscous 
life of the deep. It needed centuries, doubtless, for the 
tribes of a single island or a single coast to recognize 
a chief, to consent to follow him afar on cunning and 
bloody expeditions to the cities of the continent, whence 
they brought back jewels, golden vessels, rich stuffs, 
and women. And it was only then that the Achaians 
and the Danai of the old poems heaped up those heavy 



THE SOURCES OF GREEK ART 119 

stones on the fortified promontories, the Cyclopean 

walls, the Pelasgic walls under the shadow of which 

the Atrides, crowned with gold like the barbarian 

kings who sallied forth from the forests of the north 

two thousand years later, sat at table before the meats 

and wines, with their 

friends and their 

soldiers. 

Such origins coidd not 

but make them subtle 

and hard. jEsehylus felt 

this when he came there, 

after eight centuries, to 

listen in the solitude to 

the echo of the death 

cries of the frightful 

family. These pirates 

selected sites for their 

lair near the sea— tragi- 
cally consistent with 
their life of murder and 
the heavy orgies which followed upon their deeds of 
crime. A circle of hills — bare, devoured by fire and 
enlivened by no torrent, no tree, no bird crj-. We find 
the life of these men depicted on the sides of the rudely 
chiseled vase of Vaphio, and on the strips of wall remain- 
ing beneath the ruins of Tirynth and of Knossos. There 
are bits of frescoes there as free as the flight of the sea 
birds; the art is of a terrible candor, but is already 
disintegrating. One sees women with bare breasts, 
rouge on their lips, black around the eyes, their flounced 



Mycen.san Period (xiv-xiii Cen. 
turie8 B.C.). Vase of Palai-Kastro, 

day (Museum of Candia). 



120 . ANCIENT ART 

dresses betraying the bad taste of the barbarian; they 
are painted and sophisticated dolls bought in the 
Orient or taken by force on the expeditions of violence. 
Here are bulls pursued in the olive groves, bulls gallop- 



Mycen^an Pebiod (xii Century B.C.)- Vus<? 
of Vaphio, gold {\ati»nal Muséum. Athens). 

ing, rearing, charging upon men or tangled in great 
nets. Sometimes there are reapers who laugh and 
sing with tremendous ga,\ety among the sheaves of 
wheat which they carry, but usually we find the ques- 
tionable woman, the wild beast, and the marine mon- 
ster; a voluptuous and brutal life like that of every 
primitive man raised to a post of command by force 
or by chance. As guardians of the gates of their 
acropolis they set up stone lionesses with bronze heads, 
heavily erect. \Mien they died these men were laid 
away in a shroud of gold leaf. . . . 

It was a civilization already rotten, a Bvzantium in 



THE SOURCES OF GREEK ART 121 

miniature, where dramas of the bedroom determined 
revolutions and masi^acres. It ended Hke the others. 
The Dorian descends from the north like an avalanche, 
rolls over Argolis and even to Crete, devastating the 
cities and razing the acropolises. Legendary' Greece 
enters a thick darkness from which she would not have 
reappeared if the barbarians had not left, intact under 
the conflagration, such material testimony of her pas- 
sage through history as the kings with the masks of 
gold. The Phœnicîans desert the coast of the Pelo- 
ponnesus, of Attica, and of Crete, and the native 
populations, dispersed like a city of bees on which a 
host of wasps has descended, swarm in every direction, 
on the shores of Asia, in Sicily, and in southern Italy. 
Silence reigns around continental Greece. It was to 
be two or three hundred years before the Phœnicians 
and the Achaians, driven away by the invasion, could 
get back the route to its gulfs. 



II 

The Dorians had no word to say during the Hellenic 
middle ages; nothing from Asia entered their land. 
The ancient continent was advancing step by step, by 
way of the islands, prudently regaining a little of the 
lost territory. Melos, in need of pottery, had to wait 
till the Ceramists of primitive Athens had manufactured 
at the Dipylon, those vases with the geometrical 
designs which were the first sign of the reawakening 
of civilized life in barbarous Greece. We are here 
witnessing a slow dramatic ascent in the shadows of 



122 ANCIENT ART 

the soul, under this magnificent sky, at the center of 
this brilliant world. In order that the spark might 
kindle, it was necessary that the Dorian, the Phoenician, 
and the ancient iEgean who has become an Ionian, 
repair their broken relationships. Thereupon the 
flame mounted quicker to light up the virgin soil with 
the most dazzling focus of intelligence in history'. 

For this focus, the Homeric poems — echoes picked 
up from the annihilated world by the vanquished — 
and the radiant Greek myths which are elaborated 
confusedly along the deserted shores are the heralding 
dawnlights seen against this black background. The 
cradle of the Hellenic soul mounts with them on the 
chariot of the sun. In the evening, the Dorian herds- 
man bringing home his goats from the mountain and 
the Ionian sailor bringing home his bark from the sea 
would repeat to themselves glorious fables which 
carried over into images men's old intuitive notions 
of the phenomena of nature, or translated the struggle 
of their ancestors against the adverse forces of the 
ill-organized world. The enthusiastic naturism of 
the human soul in its freshness gave to its young 
science a robe of light, of clouds, of leaves, and of 
waters. The whole religion, the philosophy, the austere 
and charming soul of the builders of the Parthenons 
are in this anonymous and tangled poem which rises 
with the murmur of a dawn as Greece reawakens to 
life. 

The "Greek miracle" was necessary. The whole 
ancient world had prepared, had willed its coming. 
During the fruitful silence when the Dorians were 



Mtcbn« (xin Century B.C.). The Gate of the T.ioos. 



124 ANCIENT ART 

accumulating within themselves the strength of their 
soil, Egj'pt and Assyria kept their lead. But they 
were discouraged and stricken by the cold of age. 
The torch, as it grew paler, leaned toward a new race. 
They were to become the initiators of the Hellenic 
Renaissance, as they had been the guides for the child- 
hood of the peoples of the Archipelago. 

The Dorian barbarian, after his contact with less 
harsh climates, had disciplined his violence, but he 
remained rough, all of a piece, and very primitive. 
His idols, the Xoana, which he cut with a hatchet from 
oak and olive wood scarcely two hundred and fifty 
years before the Parthenon, were so rude that they 
seem to date farther back than the engraved bone of 
the reindeer hunters. It is to a totally uncultivated 
race that the intellectual heritage of Egypt and Asia 
was to fall; in exchange for their high spirituality and 
profound sensualism they were to demand the sweep 
and power of Greek virility. The inhabitants of the 
Dorian coasts, of the islands which occupied the center 
of the eastern Mediterranean, saw sails in always 
greater number coming toward them from the depths 
of the sea. Their contact with neighboring civiliza- 
tions multiplied every day. At the crossing of all the 
maritime routes of the ancient world, they were soon 
to feel the whole of it moving within them. 

The Greeks had the privilege of inhabiting a land 
so inundated, steeped and saturated with h'ght, so 
clearly defined by its own structure, that the eyes of 
man had only to open, to draw from it its law. Wlien 
man enters a bay closed in by an amphitheater of 



THE SOURCES OF GREEK ART 125 

mountains betweenaniltuininated 
sky and water that rolls rays of 
light, as if a spring of flame welled 
up under its waves, he is at the 
center of a slightly dark sapphire 
set in a circle of gold. The masses"^ 
and the lines organize themselves 
so simply, cutting such clear pro- 
files on the limpidity of space that 
their essential relations spontane- 
ously impress themselves on the 
mind. There is not a countn- in 
the world which addresses itself 
to the intelligence with more in- 
sistence, force, and precision than 
this one. All the typical aspects 
of the universe offer themselves, 
with the earth — ever^-where pene- 
trated by the sea, with the horizon 
of the sea, the bony islands, the 
straits, golden and mauve be- 
tween two liquid masses glittering 
even in the heart of the night, 
the promontories so calm and 
so bare that thc^' seem natural 
pedestals for our grateful soul, 
the rocks repeating from morning 

to evening all the changes of space lo;,;,^^ \„j (j.;ii,i of 
and the sun, with the dark forests the vii CVritury B.C.). 
on the mountains, with the pale Artemis «f IX-I.» (.W 
, , . ,, ,, -., .. tional Museum, Atkenn). 

forests m the valleys, witii tiie 



126 ANCIENT ART 

hills everywhere surrounding the dry plains, and — 
bordered by pink laurel — the streams, whose whole 
course one can embrace at a glance. 

Except in the north, one finds tormented lines of 
hills, savage ravines, sinister grottos from which sub- 
terranean vapors issue with a rumbling sound, black 
forests of pine and oak; except in the harsh countries 
of the primitive legends where man recounts his effort 
to overcome hostile nature, there are few, if any, terri- 
fying appearances; the soil is hospitable, the usual 
climate is mild, though fairly severe in winter. Life 
in this land keeps close to its earth, is active without 
excess, and simple. Neither misery nor wealth nor 
poverty. Houses are of wood, clothing of skins, and 
there is the cold water of the torrents to wash off the 
dust and blood of the stadium. There is not much 
meat, that of the goat which grazes among the fissures 
of the rocks, perhaps, but there is a little wine mixed 
with resin and honey and kept in skins; there are milk, 
bread, the fruits of the dry countries, the orange, the 
fig, and the olive. There is nothing on the horizon 
or in social life which could give birth to or develop 
mystic tendencies. A nature religion exists, a very 
rough one — in the beliefs of the people, perhaps even 
rather coarse, but welling up from springs so pure 
and so poetized by the singers that when the phi- 
losophers think to oppose it they do no more than 
extract from it the rational conception of the world 
barely hidden in its symbols. Doubtless man fears 
the gods. But since the gods resemble him, they do 
not turn his life from the normal and natural relation- 



DoBiAN Art (beginning of the vi Century). Athlete, known 
as the ApcJIo of Thera (Nalional Museum, Athens). 



188 ANCIENT ART 

ahips which bind it with that, of other men. The 
priest has but little influence. , Greece is perhaps the 
only one of the old countries where the priest did not 
live outside the pale of popular life in order to repre- 
sent to the people the great mys- 
teries as a world apart. Hence the 
rapidity of this people's evolution 
and the freedom of its investigations. 



Greece troubles herself but little, 
and then only at the very beginning 
of her art, with the enemj' powers 
which hamper our first steps. Al- 
though man already places himself 
under the protection of the intelli- 
gent forces, he has not forgotten 
the struggles which his ancestor was 
forced to maintain against the brutal 
forces of a universe which repulsed 
him. This memory is inscribed in 
the sculptures which, on the pedi- 
DoRiAN Abt (vi Cen- ment of the Parthenon of Pisistratus, 
tury). Athlete, showed Zeus Struggling against Ty- 
bronze statuette , „ , , ,, . r. i ■ i 

(private coOection). phon.or Herakles throwmg Echidna 
to earth. A barbarous work, vio- 
lently painted with blues, greens, and reds, a memory 
of avalanches, of terrifying caverns, of the storms of 
the north, it was a nightmare of savages still ill taught 
by Asia and EgT,-pt. but becoming curious and already 



130 ANCIENT ART 

eager to comprehend. The hell of the pagans will last 
but a short time. 

The temple where these idols reign, these bulls, 
these twisted serpents, these astonished visages with 
green beards, is, moreover, in its principle, what it 
will be in the greatest periods. Architecture is th(^ 
collective, necessary art which appears first and dies; 
first. The primordial desire of man, after food, is 
shelter, and it is in order to erect that shelter that, 
for the first time, he appeals to his faculty of discover- 
ing in natural constructions a certain logic whence, 
little by little, the law will issue forth and permit him 
to organize his life according to the plan of the uni- 
verse. The forest and the cliffs are the powerful 
educators in the geometrical abstraction from which 
man is to draw the means of building houses which 
are to have a chance of resisting the assault of rain 
and storms. At Corinth there already rises a temple 
with heavy and very broad columns, coming straight 
up from the ground as they mount in a block to the 
entablature. Several of them still stand. They are 
terrible to see, black, gnawed like old trees, as hard 
as the mind of the Peloponnesian countries. The 
Doric order came from those peasant houses which 
one still sees in the countryside of Asia Minor, trees 
set in the ground in four lines making a rectangle, 
supporting other trees on which the roof was to be 
placed. The form of the pediment comes from the 
slope of this roof, which is designed to carry ofif the 
rain. The Greek temple, even when it realizes the 
most lucid and the most consciously willed intellectual 



THE SOURCES OF GREEK ART 131 

combinations, sends its roots into the world of matter, 
of which it is the formulated law. 

On the sculptures of these temples the mind of Asia 



Ionian Art (vi Century). Hunters, carved 
bronze plaque {Louwe). 

has left its trace. They are continued until the great 
century, but so assimilated in the nascent Hellenic 
genius that on seeing them one cannot think of direct 
imitation, but rather of those uncertain and fleeting 



132 ANCIENT ART 

resemblances which hover on the face of children. 
The archaic Dorian Apollos, those smiling and terrible 
statues through which force mounts like a flood, make 
on*, think, it is true, of the Egj-ptian 
, because of the leg which steps 
rd and the arms glued to the 
orso. But on this hieratism 
lieocratic spirit exercises no 
. Dorian art is all of a piece, 
IS subtle, far less refined, far 
wnscious than that of the 
ors of Thebes. The passages 
en the very brusque sculptural 
; are scarcely indicated. WTiat 
ates is the need to express the 
the muscles. 

s because these Apollos are 
;s. The great cult of gj'm- 
i is bom, that necessary in- 
on which is to permit Greece 
elop the strength of arms and 
., while parallel with it there 
develops suppleness of the 
mind in its constant search 

for the universal equilib- 
loNiAN Aht (VI Century). ., , , ,. , 

.\tWna. I>r.>n.e .tatnrttc ""T^" Already, from all the 

(Xatioiiat Museum. AUiena). regions of the Greek world, 

from the islands, from the 

distant colonies, from Italy and from Asia, the young 

men c<jme to Olympia and Delphi to contest the erown 

of olive leaves. In running, in wrestling, and in throw- 



Dorian Art (vi Ceotury). Head and neck of a 
{Museum, of Delphi). 



134 ANCIENT ART 

ing the discus they are nude. The artists, who hasten 
to these national meeting places, like everyone else 
who calls himself a Hellene, have before their eyes the 
spectacle of the movements of the human frame and 
of the complex play of the muscles rolling under the 
brown skin, which shows them as if they were bare 
themselves, and which is hardened by scars. Greek 
sculpture is born in the stadium. It was to take a 
century to climb the steps of the stadium and to install 
itself in the pediments of the final Parthenons, where 
it was to become the educator of the poets and, after 
them, of the philosophers. They were to feast their 
mind on the spectacle of the increasingly subtle rela- 
tionships which sculpture established in the world 
of forms in action. There was never a more glorious 
or more striking example of the unity of our activity: 
athleticism, by the intermediary of sculpture, is the 
father of philosophy, at least, of Platonian philosophy, 
whose first concern was to turn against sculpture and 
athleticism in order to kill them. 

.Through the Dorian Apollo Greece passes from 
primitive art to archaism, properly so-called. The 
artist considers the form with more attention, pains- 
takingly disengages the meaning of it, and transports 
that meaning to his work in so uncompromising a 
manner that he imposes on it ,the appearance of an 
edifice, whose architectonic quaUty seems destined 
to know no change. The Peloponnesus becomes the 
great training school of the archaic marble workers; 
Cleoethas, Aristocles, Kanakhos, and Hagelaides open 
workshops at Argos, Sicyon, and Sparta; the citadel 



ËNDOios (middle of the vi Century B.C.)- The 
Moscophorus {Miueum of the Acropolis). 



136 ANCIENT ART 

of the Dorian ideal becomes, before Athens, the focus 
of Greek thought. But Hellenism in its entirety is 
not to find its nourishment there. Sparta is far from 
the routes of the Old World, imprisoned in a solitary 
valley where mountain torrents flow; it is a fertile 
but a jealous country, separated from the great hori- 
zons by the hard ridges of the Taygetes, which are 
covered with snow even in summer. The people 
which dwells there is as closed as the valley itself, 
and it is these isolated surroundings which are for so 
long a time to keep up its voluntary egoism. Athens, 
on the contrary, is at the center of the eastern Med- 
iterranean, and near the sea. It is the meeting point 
of the positive and disciplined Dorian element, which 
mounts from the south toward Corinth, ^Egina, and 
Attica in its search for lands to dominate, and of the 
Ionian element which brings to the city, through the 
sieve of the islands, the artist spirit of Asia, made 
supple and subtle by the habits of trade, diplomacy, 
and smuggling. The glory of Sparta, in reality, is 
that of having offered to Athens a virgin soil to fer- 
tilize and also, by harassing her without mercy, to 
have kept her in condition, to have compelled her for 
a long time to cultivate her energy. Athens, tempered 
by these struggles, was not slow in showing her supe- 
riority. WTien the soldiers of Darius followed the 
traders of Asia to the European coast, it is she who 
was at the head of the Greeks, while Sparta, inclosed 
in the blind cult of her personal interest, took her 
, place only after the combat. 

WTiere are we to find the first step of Ionian art in 



THE SOURCES OF GREEK ART 137 

its march toward Attica — the uncertain dawn of the 
great Oriental sensualism rendered healthy by the 
sea and sharpened by commerce, which will flood the 
Dorian soul with humanity? The Hera of Samos is, 
perhaps, even stiff er than the Peloponnesian athletes, < 
as it is nearer to Saite Egypt, which is unfolding at 
this moment and investing hieratic form with a hu- 
manity of its own. A tight sheath of cloth impris- 
ons the legs, which are close together,. but under the 
figure's light veil, with its lines like those on water, 
the shoulders, the arms, the breast, and the hollowed 
back have profiles of a moving grace, and planes which 
meet one another and interpenetrate with the delicacy 
of a confession. It is this spirit of abounding tender-^- 
ness which is soon to take root on the Greek continent. 
From the end' of the sixth century^ Dorian art and 
Ionian art were neighbors everywhere without having 
yet recognized each other fully. At Delphi, at the 
threshold of the Treasury of the Cnidians, Asiatic 
Greece saluted with a mysterious smile the rude 
statue maker of the Peloponnesus who had set up the 
women, the lions, and the formidable horses in the 
pediment of the Sanctuary of Apollo. The caryatids 
which supported the Asiatic architrave were strange, 
secret women; they had a winged grace, like that of 
an animal and of a dance; they seemed to guard the 
gate of temptation, which led to a warmth within, 
like that of the sun, and to untasted intoxications. 
The Dorian spirit and the Ionian spirit — the young 
countryman bursting with vigor and the woman 
bedecked, caressing, questionable — met and loved. 



V 



138 ANCIENT ART 

Attic art, which in its adult age was to be the great 
classic sculpture, austere and Jiving, was to be bom 
of their union. 

IV 

Marble had been skillfully treated in Athens for 
more than a hundred years, and the Acropolis, especially 
at the time of Pisistratus, had been coVered with mon- 
uments and statues. But Endoios, the great Athenian 
master of the sixth century, still remained subject to 
Ionian traditions. It was only on the eve of the 
Median wars that the Hellenic synthesis, before man- 
ifesting itself by the collective action of resistance to 
the invader, is outlined in certain minds. 

Undoubtedly, a people is too complex an organism, 
and one whose generating elements merge too closely 
and are too numerous to permit us to determine the 
degree of influence of each one of these elements in 
all the acts which express the people. It is like a river 
made up of a hundreid streams, of a thousand torrents 
or brooks which bring to it, mixed together, the snow 
swept down by avalanches, the mud of clay countries, 
sand and flint, and the coolness and aroma of the 
forests it has crossed. It is the river, a broad living 
unity, rolling the same waters with the same sound. 
The men working at a particular period supply all 
the intermediary degrees which the future needs in 
order to pass from one group of men to another without 
effort and without finding in them differences of 
aspiration, though they themselves had imagined that 
they differed profoundly. And the men of this time 



Ionian Art (eod of vi Century B.C.). Caryatid oi the Treasury 
of the Cnidians, detail (Mmmtn of Delphi). 



140 ANCIENT ART 

are united to those who precede them and to those 
who follow them by necessary relationships wherein 
the mysterious continuity of our activity is mani- 
fested. It is not possible to fix the moment or to 
designate the work in which the Hellenic soul, as we 
call it to-day, tried to define itself for the first time. 
We can only turn our eyes to those works which pos- 
sess the first quiver of life, over which there seems to 
pass the first breath of liberty and spiritual joy, in 
order that we may surprise in them the awakening 
of a new humanity to the beauty of living. 

The young women found near the Erechtheion, 
twenty years ago, amid the rubbish of the foundations 
of the Parthenon, where the Greek workmen had put 
them after the sacking and burning of the Acropolis 
by the soldiers of Xerxes, were, perhaps, the first who 
had the smile of intoxication which announces the 
awakening. Undoubtedly the perfume of the islands 
was predominant with them. They think above all 
of pleasing; they are feminine; an invincible amorous 
force shines from them and accompanies them with a 
murmur of desire. But on seeing the surety of their 
planes and their definite and powerful equilibrium, 
we cannot doubt that the Dorian artisan, who was 
then working at ^Egina, Corinth, and even Athens, 
had had repeated contacts with the Ionian immigrant 
whom the Persian conquest had driven back to the 
Occident. * 

Brought from the Orient by the adventurers of the 
sea — the men who told such lying, intoxicating, and 
savage tales — these women take good care not to 



THE SOURCES OF GREEK ART 141 

shock the hard, austere world which tliey have come 

to visit. They remain motionless, holding up their 

robes with one hand. Their red hair, which hangs on 

their backs and whose tresses 

fall on each side of their 

necks to rest on their breasts, 

is plaited and curled; it is 

dyed, doubtless, and streams 

with jewels. Sometimes 

their foreheads are diademed, 

their wrists encircled with 

bracelets, their ears loaded 

with rings. From head to 

foot they are painted, with 

blue, red, ochre, and yellow, 

and their eyes of enamel 

glow in their smiling faces. 

These creatures so liarbar- 

ousty illuminated, dazzling 

and bizarre as the birds of 

the tropics, have the strong 

savor of the painted and 

adorned women of the 

Orient; they are somewhat 

vulgar, perhaps, but fascina- Ionian Art (end of ihc vi 

ting none the less, like things ,^^"^"'>' ^■^■^- .^^-'^ 
» I-, r ■ . 1 {M'^eum of the Aeropolm). 

from afar off, like fairy-tale 

beings, childish animals, pampered slaves. They are 
beautiful. We love them with a tenderness which can- 
not exhaust itself. The whole after-workl has issued 
from their firm, slender flanks. 



142 ANCIENT ART 

They have overturned the curious notions that were 
anchored in us by academic idealism. For three hun- 
dred years it regarded immaculate «aarble as a senti- 
mental emblem of serenity — one which never existed, 
save in the minds of certain philosophers, at the hour 
when Greece was approaching her decline. And 
white marble also stood for a perfection which, it is 
to be hoped, we shall not attain — discontent, curi- 
osity, and effort being the very condition of life. 
Until the complete unfolding of her art in any case, 
and probably until her fall, Greece painted her gods 
and her temples. Variegated with blues and reds, 
alive like men and women, the gods became animated 
at break of day, took part in the surprises and joys 
of the light, and moved in the depth of the gathering 
shadow. They belonged to the crowd that swarmed 
at the foot of the Acropolis, the busy, noisy, familiar 
crowd of a port leading to the Orient; they came out 
of the dirty alleys where stray dogs fought for scraps 
of offal. We see them pass before the shop windows 
where the port spreads out its quarters of mutton 
and lamb, its fruits, its heaps of spice, its dyed stuffs, 
and its glassware; they are in the colorful squares so 
full of cries and calls — of the odors of garlic, rotting 
food, and aromatic herbs. We see the naked children, 
the questionable traders, the sailors hardened by the 
wind, the women with the painted eyes, dressed in 
their garish clothing. The temples and the monu- 
ments covered with ochre, with vermilion, green, 
azure, and gold, are made up of the tones of the sky, 
of the space over the sea — ^greenish or flushed with 



THE SOURCES OF GREEK ART 143 

purple, they have the colors of the sea, violet or blue, 
of the earth, of its dress of thin crops and dry foliage, 
with the milky olive trees and the black cypresses as 
they marry their forms to the ever-present forms, of 
the sinuous bays and the hills. What is the role of 
the statue maker? It is to balance, in the lucidity 
and the firmness of his intelligence, all these scattered 
elements, so that on their apparent chaos he may 
impose clear relationships and harmonious directions. 
The Apollonian myth kept watch in the conscious- 
ness — obscure as yet, but solid and swelling with 
primitive faith — of the Athenian marble cutters. The 
strange women who had taken possession of the 
Athenian fortress could not have unnerved for more 
than an hour the city's resistance to the Asiatic hordes 
which they had preceded by only a short time. Already 
the element of orgy and sentimental excess represented 
by their polychromy had been held in check at every 
point by clear-cut planes and precise contours, thereby 
sustaining its alluring, smiling action. These planes 
and contours mark the Athenian's extraordinary urge 
toward domination of the sensual impulse by the 
virile health of his nascent reason. The miraculous 
and fatigued soul of Asia recovers its strength and 
its faith upon contact with this fierce energy, which 
it enlightens with intelligence in an unexpected 
exchange. We have reached the mysterious hour 
when the flower will unfold to the light the tremble 
of its petals, which till now had been pressed together 
in their green sheath. These idols represent, per- 
haps, man's finest effort to discover in his conscious- 



144 ANCIENT ART 

ness the approbation of his instinct. There is in them 
a tension of soul which moves us, an energy devoted 
wholly to searching out our agreement of an hour with 
a world whose secret harmony we feel to live within 
us. Ingenuous as youth, perverse as desire, they are 
as firm and as free as the will. 

With them Greek archaism possessed itself com- 
pletely of that architectural conception of form which 
may be very dangerous because it carries with it the 
risk of never escaping from it, as in the case of the 
Egyptians. It is admirable. It is necessary. It is 
a more elevated form in the eyes of some than the 
balanced expression of our earthly destiny which the 
fifth century was to realize among the Greeks. To 
adhere to it, however, is to pause over appearances of 
the absolute, beyond which intuition can advance no 
farther, and to forbid the intelligence to search out, 
in . its relationships with the surrounding world, its 
general conception of humanity. It is to be afraid 
of approaching the mystery which we know to be 
impenetrable and which forever retreats, in the meas- 
ure that we advance. To reproach Greek art with 
having been human is to reproach man for existing. 
And it is to forget, indeed, that the art of the fifth 
century, even when it broke the frames of archaic 
form to let the palpitation and the atmosphere of life 
enter them by torrents, retained all the principles 
which make the strength and the austerity of that 
form. 

The Egj^ptian statue maker and the Greek statue 
maker of the earlier centuries, preoccupied solely wîth 



Ionian Art (end of the vi Century B.C.)- 

(Museum of the AcTOpotû). 



146 ANCIENT ART 

establishing the architecture of their ensembles before 
they penetrated to the dense world of gestures and 
feelings, discovered the law of profiles and by so doing 
founded the science of sculpture. But the element 
which animates the block, which gives life to the 
form, is lacking, or, at least, it takes on a metaphysical 
meaning which separates it a little more each day from 
the human significance of our activity and leads it 
fatally to the desert of pure abstraction which is 
closed on every side. Egj'ptian sculpture, arrested 
for all time in its movement, unable to extend its 
research, set itself the task of rendering subtle the 
passage^ the wave without beginning or end which 
binds one plane to another; it was absorbed in this 
problem to the extent of losing sight of the mother 
form which was the point of departure for the prob- 
lem; and because it thus forgot, Egyptian art died 
without hope of resurrection. Saite sculpture made 
only timid attempts at independence; it recommenced 
the same task, it imposed on granite and bronze the 
docility of clay, it saw in them the undulation of water, 
it let light and shade glide over them like clouds over 
the soil. But it exhausted itself in modulating the 
inflections of its dream much sooner than Theban 
sculpture did, because Thebes, at least, made a long 
effort to reach the formulation of this dream, and 
because after this dream nothing more remains if the 
external world is forever banned. Antseus needed to 
touch the earth again. The Greek sculptor, free to 
explore the world of appearances at his ease, did not 
fail to perceive that in discovering the relationships 



THE SOURCES OF GREEK ART 147 

of the planes he was to discover the ties which bind 
to man and to one another all the phenomena of the 
senses which reveal the universe to us. The passage, 
wherein the Egj'ptians saw only a metaphysical exer- 
cise — however admir- 
able, becomes, with 
the Greek, the instru- 
ment of sensuous and 
rational investigation. 
After him the passage 
was to the sculptural 
■plane what philosophy 
is to science. 

It is on this account 
that we love the little 
painted idols, the 
astonished and bar- 
barous orantes of the 
primitive Acropolis. 
They are at the point 
of highest tension 
which we find 
Greek thought, at the 
decisive moment 
when human genius is 
to choose the path it is to take. The Median wars came. 
Athens, at the head of the Greek cities, gave to history 
one of its finest spectacles. She was to temper her 
physical strength in sacrifice and sufTering, she was to 
use the repose of mind, which the war was to bring her, 
to bequeath to the next generation immense intellectual 



Ionian Art (end of the vi Centurj). 
Samian woman 

(Miaeum of the Aerùpolis). 



148 ANCIENT ART 

reserves that rush forth in forests of niarble, tragedies, 
and triumphal odes. Thus always, in the course of 
our history, the great flowering of the inind follows 
the great animal effort, and the men of action engender 
the men of thought. We are approaching the hour 
when human enthusiasm had its hour of most powerful 
exaltation. The creatures of marble, so full of energy 
and sweetness, who peopled the citadel, had just been 
finished when the Persians mutilated them; iEschylus 
fights at IVIarathon. Pindar makes the branches of the 
sacred tree tremble in the wind of his verse, Sophocles, 
as a boy, bares his body to sing the Psean on the shore 
of Salamis. Such vitality uplifts the artists who are 
to work among the ruins of the Acropolis, that, instead 
of setting up anew the statues which have been thrown 
to earth, they find them good enough only to support 
the pedestal of the statues which sleep within them. 



Tii£ Acropolis of Atueks. 



Chapter V. PHIDIAS 




s^ HE philosophic sculpture is born of liberty 
and dies because of it. The slave in 
Assyria could describe vividly the things 
he was permitted to see; in Egj-pt, he 
could give a definition of form as firm 
as the discipline which bowed him down, as full of 
nuances, as moving as the faith which sustained him. 
The free man alone gives life to the law, letids to science 
the life of his emotion, and sees that in his own mind 
we reach the crest of that continuing wave which 
attaches us to things in their entirety — until the day 
when science kills his emotion. 

The artist of to-day is afraid of words, when he does 
not fall a victim to them. He is right to refrain from 



150 ANCIENT ART 

listening to the professional philosopher and especially 
to refrain from following him. He is wrong to be 
afraid of passing for a philosopher. Also, if we have 
no right to forget that Phidias followed the discourses 
of Anaxagoras, we recognize that he might, without 



Mginjl (beginniag of the v Century). Temple of Athena. 

loss, have been ignorant of metaphysics. He looked 
upon life with simplicity, but what he could see of it 
developed in him so lucid a comprehension of the rela- 
tionships which, for the artist, make up its unity and 
continuity, that minds skillful in generalizing could 
extract from his work the elements out of which the 
modern world has come. Phidias formed Socrates ' 
and Plato — unknown to theniNclves, doubtless- — when 
'It must be recalled thsl Socrates worked as a stulplor. 



PHIDIAS 151 

he materialized for them, in the elearest, the most 
veracious, and the most human of languages, the 
mysterious affinities which give life to ideas. 



Attic Aht (about 475). Demeler of Eleusis 
(National Museum, Athens). 

We see the philosophic spirit as it is horn at the 
beginning of the fifth century, still hesitating and 
astonished at the daylight; it appears already in the 
"Charioteer" and in the statues of ^gina. Sculptural 



152 ANCIENT ART 

science, which is not obliged to copy form, but rather 
to establish the planes which reveal the profound law 
of structure and the conditions of equilibrium of form — 
sculptural science already exists. The "Charioteer" 
is as straight as a tree trunk; one feels the framework 
within it, one sees how it is deikied by all its contours. 
It is a theorem of bronze. But in the folds of its 
rigid robe, in its narrow bare feet planted flat on the 
ground, its nervous arm and open fingers, in its mus- 
cular shoulders, its broad neck, its fixed eyes, and 
round cranium, a slow wave circulates which — by 
somewhat abrupt fits and starts — tries to convey from 
one plane to another the integrally conceived forces 
of life which determined these planes. The same 
implacable surfaces, the same harsh passages, are in 
the warriors of iEgina, with something more; there 
is here, in the abstract, a course which leads from one 
figure to another across empty space, and which thus 
creates a continuing whole, even if still a troubled one, 
lacking in suppleness and partaking of the mechanical; 
but in it an irresistible sense of relationship awakens; 
the firm flower is only half open, and it demands its 
full expansion. 

There is no break in the conditions we are studying. 
The plastic evolution and the moral evolution mount 
in a single pure wave. Antenor has already erected 
the Tyrannicides on the Agora — the symbolic myths i 
unroll in the frieze of the temples, and the great national 
wars mingle the divinities with the soldiers, on the 
pediments of ^Egina. The athlete is to become the 
man, the man is to become the god, until the moment 



Triumpliant cliariotwr (W'i ] 
(Mmcum of Dripki.) 



154 



ANCIENT ART 



when the artists, having created the god, find in him 
the elements of a new humanity. Polycleitus and 
Myron have already taJcen from the form of the 
wrestler, the runner, the charioteer, and the discus 
thrower the idea of those har- 
monious proportions which shall 
best define the masculine body in 
its function of uniting strength, 
skill, agility, nervous grace, and 
moral calm. To Polycleitus, 
the Dorian, belong rude and 
gathered power, virile harmony 
in repose; to Jlyron, the Athe- 
nian, belong virile harmony in 
movement, the vigor in the 
planes of the muscles, which 
show in a vibrant silence when 
the contracted tendons press 
hard on the head of the bones, 
when the furrows at the bottom 
of which repose the nerves and 
arteries, conveyors of energ\-, 
hollow themselves out at the 
moment when the tendons grow 
taut. The one establishes the 
profound architecture of the 
human body, its strength — tike 
that of a bare column — ^and its 
visible sj-mmetry, which the gesture and the model- 
ing scarcely break in order that the theorem may be 
established upon sensation. The other discovers the 



Attic Art (v Century), 
Dancer, bnin^te statuetti 
(Hibliiilheiiue Sationale). 



DoRUN Abt (v Century). Athlete 
(from the cast in the Ecole de» Beaux-Arlt). 



156 ANCIENT ART 

theorem in the heart of sensation itself, to which the 
living arabesque returns as a geometrical abstraction, 
with the whirl of all its volumes, with the quiver of 
all its surfaces. By the one, man is described in his 
stable form, by his vertical frame, by the sheaves of 
the arm and leg muscles whose precise undulations 
mark out or mask the skeleton, by his straight belly, 
broad, sonorous chest, the circle of the collar bones 
and the shoulder blades carrying the column of the 
neck, the round head with its glance which continues 
it without a break. By the other, he is described in 
his action. It remains for Phidias onl}^ to penetrate 
the statics of Polycleitus with the dynamics of Myron 
in rounder, fuller masses, defined by planes more broad 
and more mingled with the light — and he has made 
the marble glow with a higher life and given a heroic 
meaning to that form and this action. In a few years, 
which fly with the swiftness of human imagination, 
anthropomorphism ripens. 



II 

And here is an admirable thing! Even by the mouth 
of its comic poets who had, however, been formed by 
the great works and fed by the myths of the past, 
this race needed to proclaim its faith. Read in the 
"Peace" the moving, religious saying of Aristophanes: 
"The exiling of Phidias brought on the war. Pericles, 
who feared the same fate and who distrusted the bad 
character of the Athenians, cast away peace. . . . By 
Apollo, I was unaware that Phidias was related to 



PHIDIAS 157 

that goddess. . . . Now I know why she is so beauti- 
ful." The whole of anthropomorphic idealism is in 
that speech. The Greek makes his gods în the image 
of man, and tlie god is beautiful, to the extent that 
man is lofty in mind. 

On this simple soil, by this healthy race, religious 
naturalism was to reach its goal of deifying the natural 
and moral laws as men and women. The poet came. 



Dorian Art (alioiit 4(i0 B.C.). Temple of Zeus at Olympia. 
Cumlwt of Centaurs am) Lisptths (Museum '>/ Olympia). 

and his symbols gave resplendent visages to these 
deifications. What the Greek really adori-d when he 
was matured and liberated was the accord between 
his mind and the law. Whatever may have been said 
of it, anthropomorphism is the only religion that 
science has left intact, for science is the law deduced 
from the aspects of life by man, and only by him. Our 
conception of the world is the only proof we can offer 
of its existence and of our own. 

The personified laws, the gods who have become 
real beings for the crowd, are not tyrants, not even 
the creators of men^ — they are other men, more accom- 
plished in their virtue, more grandiosi* in their disorder. 
They have the faults and the impulses of men, they 



158 ANCIENT ART 

carry the latter's wisdom and beauty to the degree 
where these become fateful forces. They are the 
human ideal opposed by human passions, the laws 
which it is our business — against the resistance of 
egoism and of the elements of nature — to deduce from 
the world and to obey. Herakles combats the acci- 
dent, the thing that retards and opposes our progress 
toward order. He enters the forests to beat the lions 
to death, he dries up swariips, he cuts the throats of 
evil men and overpowers bulls. His hairy arms, his 
knees, and his breast bleed from his struggle with the 
rocks. He protects the childhood of the organizing 
will against the adult brutality of things. At his side, 
Prometheus starts out for his conquest of the lightning 
— that is to say, of the mind. The Greek refuses to 
have anything to do with the god of terrible distances 
who kills the soul and the flesh through the hand of 
the priest. He tears the fire from him. The god 
nails him down with pain, but he cries out in revolt 
until Herakles comes to cut his bonds. By dint of 
willing it, man creates his own liberty. 

Thus from the man to the god, from the real to the 
ideal, from acquired adaptions to desired adaptions, 
the hero threads his path. The human mind, in a 
splendid etfort, rejoins the divine law. Polytheism 
organizes the primitive pantheism, and, with admirable 
audacity, brings out the spirit of it, little thinking that 
this flame, which Prometheus seized for a moment, will, 
r when it tries to escape, consume the world. The 
sensation of spiritual infiniteness that Egyptian art 
gives, and of material infiniteness that Hindoo art 



PHIDIAS 159 

gives, is not to be found in the art that expresses the 
Hellenic soul. We find in this art an accent of balanced 
harmony which it alone has, and which keeps within 
the limits of our intelligence. But the intelligence 



Dorian Art (about 460 B.C.). Temple of Zeus at Olympia. 
Centaur carrying off a Lapith {Museum of Olympia). 

cannot grasp the beginning and the end of the melody 
with which it is cradled. AH forms an<l all forces are 
bound together in a deep solidarity; one passes into 
law, passes into divinity. Doubtless, in the enormous 
universe of which the city is the definitive image, there 
are antagonisms, there are action and reaction, but all 
partial conflicts are effaced and melte<l in the intel- 



160 ANCIENT ART 

lectual order which man founds. Heraclitus has just 
affirmed, together with the eternal flow of things, the 
identity of contraries and their profound agreement 
in universal eurhythm. 
It is this, above all, that the old pediments of 01j-m])ia 



L Gr*x:i\ (alM.ut 450 B.C.). Temple of Neptune at 
PœHtum, 



came to teach us. Earthquakes have shaken them 
from their place, man has broken them and dispersed 
their pieces, the overflow of the Alpheu.s Iisis wa-slied 
away their violent polychromy. Even as they are, 
with terrible gaps, often without heads, without 
torsos, almost always without Hmbs, held by iron sup- 
ports, they remain one, coherent and integral as when, 
at the foot of Kronion in Altis, they towered over the 
forests peopled with statues. Inflamed with passion. 



PHIDIAS 161 

drunk with wine, the centaurs drag away the virgins. 
Fists and elbows strike; -fingers twist and loosen the 
grasp of other hands; knives kill, and the great bodies 
sink under the ax, to the sound of the hammering 
hoofs, of sobs, and of imprecations. The brute dies, 
but the fever burns in his loins and his savage embrace 



Dorian Art (about 460 B.C.). Temple of Zciia at Olympia. 
Servant (Museum of Olympia). 

tightens anew. Here everything is rude action, ardor 
of tfic new faith, violence of the old myths which retold 
tlie tale of the abductions of the primitive forests where 
all was menace, assault, and mysterious terror. Broad, 
animated modeling and surfaces cut with great strokes 
carry out the mood of struggle, of desire, of murder 
and death. And withal, a sovereign calm hovers over 
the scene. One might call it a surging, roaring sea 



162 ANCIENT ART 

which none the less forms an immense and tranquil 
harmony — because the wave is continuous, because 
the same forces hollow it out, lift it up, and make it 
fall forever, to arise forever. 

Some Dorian ^Eschylus sculptured this great thing 
at the hour when the fusion of the Apollonian soul and 
of Dionysian intoxication caused tragedy to well up 
from the breast of orgiastic music, when a prodigious 
equilibrium maintained the mystic agitation in the 
flame of the mind; and he felt within him the tremor 
of an instinct of harmony which did not end with the 
horizon seen by his eyes. In all the things he hears 
other things resound, distant echoes are born to swell 
progressively and to die away little by little — there 
is in nature not a single movement of which the germ 
and the repercussion cannot be traced in all move- 
ments which manifest nature. In the sculpture of 
Olympia there is an enchaining of causes and effects 
which has its perfect logic, but which is still intoxicated 
with the discovery of itself. The mind of the artist 
prolongs it unbroken so that he may gather up into 
himself its tumult and passion. One moment more 
and Phidias transforms it into spiritual harmonies 
which mark the expansion of the intelligence into the 
fullness of love. 

Ill 

With him modeling is no longer a science, it is not 
yet a trade, it is a living thought. The volumes, the 
movements, the surge that starts from one angle of 
the pediment to end at the other — everything is sculp- 



Myrom. The discus thrower. Copy of the Greek, 

{National Museum, Rome). 



164 ANCIENT ART 

tured from within, everything obeys inner forces in 
order to reveal their meaning to us. The living wave 
runs through the limbs, they are instinct with it, 
rounded or extended by it; it models the heads of the 
bones and, as ravines cut into a plain, it indents the 
glorious torsos from the secret belly to the tremble 
of the hard breasts. The sap, which rises in it and 
causes it to pulsate, makes of each fragment of the 
material, even when broken, a moving entity which 
participates in the existence of the whole, receiving 
life from it and returning life to it. An organic soli- 
darity binds the parts together triumphantly. A 
higher life of the soul, for the first and the only time 
in history merged and confounded with the tempes- 
tuous life of the elements, rises above a world intox- 
icated and strong in the immortal youth of a moment 
which cannot last. 

From the dusk of morning to the dusk of night the 
pediments spread out their scroll of life. In them 
peace descends with the night and light mounts with 
the day. From the two arms of Phoebus, which 
emerge from the horizon, stretching out toward the 
peak of the world, to the head of the horse whose 
body is already in the shadow at the other side of the 
sky, life grows, marches on without haste, and dimin- 
ishes. The whole of life. Without interruption these 
forms continue one another. Like peaceful vegeta- 
tion they come forth from the earth and, in the air 
from which they draw their life, unite their branches 
and mingle their foliage. Alone or entwined, they 
continue one another, as the plain into which the hill 



PHIDUS 165 

melts, the valley that reaches up to the mountain, the 
river and its estuary which the sea absorbs and the 
bay which goes from promontory to promontory. 
The shoulder is made for the brow which lies on it, 
the arm for the waist which it embraces, the ground 



Sicily (v Century). Temple of Segesta. 

lends its strength to the hand that presses on it, to 
the arm that shoots up from it like a rough tree and 
that holds up the half-reclining torso. It is limitless 
space that goes to mingle with the blood in the breasts 
and, when tme looks at the eyes one would say that 
at the depths of their motionless pools space weds 
with the spirit which has come to repose there and to 
recover its vigor. The mechanical course of the 
heavenly bodies, the sound of the sea, the eternal tide 
of its embryos, and tlie unseizable flight of universal 



166 ANCIENT ART 

movement pass incessantly into these profound fonns 
to blossom into intelligent energj\ 

A great and solemn moment! Man prolongs nature, 
whose rhythm is in his heart, determining, at each 
beat, the flux and reflux of his soul. Consciousness 
explains instinct and fulfills its higher function, which 
is to penetrate the order of the world, that it may 
obey it the better. The soul consents not to abandon 
the form, but to express itself through the form, and 
to let its single light flash out at the contact. The 
mind is like the perfume of man's necessary sensualism, 
and the senses demand of the mind that it justify their 
desires. Reason does not yet weaken sentiment; instead 
sentiment acquires new strength by marrying with 
reason. The highest idealism never loses sight of the 
actual elements of its generalizations, and when the 
Greek artist models a form in nature it shines with 
a spontaneous light of symbolic truth. 

Greek art, at this time, reaches the philosophic 
moment. It is a thing of living change. Idealistic 
in its desire, it lives because it demands of life the 
elements of its idçal constructions. It is the species 
in the law, the man and the woman, the horse and the 
ox, the flower, the fruit, the being exclusively described 
by its essential qualities and made to live as it is, in 
the exercise of its normal functions. It is, at the same 
time, a man, a horse, an ox, a flower, and a fruit. The 
great Venus, peaceful as an absolute, is willed by the 
whole race. She sums up its hopes, she fixes its desire, 
but her swelling neck, her beautiful ripening breasts, 
her moving sides make her alive. She lends her glow 



The discus thrower. Fragment of a tlreuk copy 
{National Museum, Rome). 



168 ANCIENT ART 

to space which caresses her, touches her sides with 
gold, makes her lungs rise and fall. It penetrates her, 
she mingles with it. She is the unseizable instant 
when eternity meets universal life. 

This state of equilibrium, wherein all the vital 
powers seem to hang suspended in the consciousness 
of man before bursting forth and multiplying under 
definite forms, imparts its force to all Greek art 
of the highest class. The anonymous sculptor of 
Olympia and Phidias and his pupils, the architects 
of the Acropolis, express the same relations, the 
same prodigious and blended universe brought to 
the human scale, the same type of reason, superior 
to the accidents of nature and subordinated to its 
laws. But the language of each one remains as per- 
sonal as his body, his hands, the form of his forehead, 
the color of his eyes, the whole of his elemental sub- 
stance, which is written into the marble bv the same 
stroke that renders the universal order which he has 
understood and marked with its external form. See 
the faith, the almost savage sweep of the man who 
made the statues of Olympia, his rugged and broad 
phrase. See the religion, the sustained energy, the 
reserve of Phidias, his long, balanced phrase. See, in 
the encircling frieze, the discretion of his pupils who 
have neither his freedom nor his power, but who are 
calm as he is, because, like him, they live in an hour 
of certitude. Man, the animals, and the elements, 
ever^^thing consents to its role, and the artist feels, in 
his fraternal heart, the joy of this consent. It is with 
the same spirit that he tells of the warmth of women. 



PHIDIAS 169 

the strength of men, and the rununation of oxen. A 
life as glorious as the summer! !Man has seized the 
meaning of his activity; it is by what is around him 
that he frees himself and cultivates himself; it is through 
himself that he humanizes what is around him. 



Phidias (?). (about 440 B.C.). Tympanum of the 
Parthenon. The liurse ot niplil (Uriliah Musnim). 

The bad Roman copies of works belonging to the 
last period of Greece, the soft goddesses, the draped 
gods brandishing their lyres, the figures from literature 
and works of the school have for a long time calum- 
niated Greek art. It expres.se<i to us a colorless people, 
assuming a theatrical attitude to overawe the future. 
The artificial heroism hid the real heroism, and the 
ruggedness and freshness of the primitive were effaced 



170 ANCIENT ART 

by the fictions of the Alexandrine romancers. We 
used to describe the draperies of the "Fates" before 
having seen their knees, the shelter of their warm 
abdomen, and their torsos mounting with the power 



Phidias (P), (about 440 B.C.). Tympanum of the 
Parthenon, Theseus {Hritùih Museum). 

and tumult of a wave to the absent heads which we 
divine as leaning over in confidences and confession. 
The anatomy of the "Theseus" and the "Ilyssus" 
masked the formidable life that swells and dilates 
them and makes its pulsations pass even to the frag- 
ments that have disappeared. The "Panatheniac 
Frieze" revealed to us the manner in which girls walk 
as they bear burdens, flowers, and sheaves, how horse- 
men defile, the tranquillity of intelligent strength dom- 



PHIDIAS 171 

inating brute strength, how oxen go with the same 
step to the slaughterhouse and to work. We had 
forgotten that these were men and women who had 
lived, who had loved and suffered, and beasts which 
used to dig the furrows in the thin plain of Attica, and 
whose fat and flesh used to bum on the altars. 



Phidias (?), (alxiut 440 B.C.)- Tympanum of the Parthenon. 
The Fates, detail [Briliak Mmeum). 

WTiether the mutilated marbles which carry Greek 
thought from the frontiers of archaism to the threshold 
of the decadence are wrestlers or virgins, the ease of 
strength shines from them, and an irresistible sweet- 
ness. When we come forth from the murderous 
effigies of Assyria or the silent statues of Egj'pt we 
feel ourselves brought back into the living universe, 
after having attuned the primitive instincts to the 



172 ANCIENT ART 

world of tlie inind. The obsessing anguish and the 
terror retreat into memory; we breathe deeply, we 
find ourselves to be what we did not yet know we 
were; we are the beings imaged by our presentiments. 



tcrmoB. The Parthenon (447.43«), Athens. 

We have seen the athletes arise quite naked in the 
light, as numerous as the old beliefs, and the young, 
astonished faces starting from the blue and green 
robes, like great fiowers amid the fields. Demeter 
has left the ruins of Eleusis, teïiderly to place in the 
hand of the calm Triptolemus the grain of wheat which 
is to give bread to men, and with it, science and peace. 
Blind desire and divine modesty, the eternal conSict 
that compromises or realizes our higher equiUbrium — 
all this we have seen issuing from the dust of Olympia, 
with the brutes in their madness, the virgins assailed. 



Nemea (v r.-nti(ry). Tt-mplc of Zcii 



174 ANCIENT ART 

their beautiful bodies tliat struggle out of the embrace, 
their beautiful heavy arms in revolt. There, at the 
level of the ground, we have picked up the trace of 
the life of the little slaves of the old serving-woman. 



Phidias Mi»k.1 of), (atwit 440 B.C.). The Partht-non. 
H»rst-meii of tlie Fricw^ (llrilish Miwii»,). 

and, at the angle of the pediments, we have felt the 
weight of the breast of women already feeling the 
movement of new life within them. With the good 
Herakles, we have carried the globe, swejit the stable, 
and strangled the monsters; we have wandered over 
the earth to make it healthful, and our hearts with it. 
In the pediments of the great temple of the Acropolis, 
with the rough-grained torsos, the full limits, the wave 
of humanity that mounts and is appeased, we have 



PHIDIAS 175 

recognized, in the projections into the hght and the 
hollowings into the shadow, the image of our destiny. 
The panting Victories have hung upon their wings that 
we may surprise, under the robe that proclaims it, the 
hesitation of the flanks, the breasts, the belly, as they 
emerge into their prime. 
All these deified beings 
show us at once the roots 
and the summit of our 
effort. 



The meeting of life and 
of the accessible heavens, 
this ideal realized on the 
face of the temples and 
in the intelligence of the 
heroes, was to flower, for 
the glory of the Greeks 

and the demonstration of ^^,^. .^^^ J^^^^^ ^^^^^ 
the unity of the soul, on a 

political plane of struggle and liberation- Democracy 
is not tuUy victorious and consequently it is already 
on the road to decline, but Greece makes the effort 
from which democracy is to be born. With the 
wooden idols and the multicolored monsters of the 
old temples came the death of the oligarchy, the power 
delegated to a caste which, at bottom, sj-mbolized 
accepted revelation. Tyranny, which, in Greece, is 
government by one man whose science has been rec- 
ognized, the system whose apogee coincides, in the 



176 ANCIENT ART 

fourth century, with the determination of sculptural 
science — tyranny is shaken when the movement of life 
invades the archaic form. The first statues to stir 
are those of Harmodios and Aristogiton, the men who 
killed the King of Athens. Then the crushing forces 
which iEschylus set like blocks upon the human soul 
are shaken, with Sophocles, to penetrate one another, 
to act on one another, and to cause their balanced 
energy to radiate in consciousness and will. Then 
Phidias transports into marble the poise of life, and 
man is ripe for liberty. Democracy appears — the 
transitory political expression of the antagonism and 
the agreement of forces in the cosmic harmony. 

Then from every Acropolis a Parthenon arises. The 
chief of the democracy inspires them, the people work 
at them, the humblest stonecutter gets the same pay 
as Ictinos the architect, or Phidias the sculptor. At 
the Panatheniac festivals, with the ritual order ill 
observed by the enthusiastic populace, in the dust 
and the sunlight, to the often discordant sound of 
Oriental music and the thousand bare feet striking 
the ground, with the brutal splendor of the dyed robes, 
the jewels, the rouge, and the fruits, the city sends to 
the Parthenon its hope — with the young girls scattering 
flowers, waving palms, and singing hymns, its strength 
with the horsemen, and its wisdom with the old men. 
The protecting divinity is to be thanked for having 
permitted the meeting and sanctioned the accord 
between man and the law. 

The temple sums up the Greek soul. It is neither 
the house of the priest as the Egyptian temple was. 



Phidias {?), Ionian school {?). Young priestes 
{National Muaeuvt, Rome). 



178 ANCIENT ART 

nor the house of the people as the cathedral is to be; 
it is the, house of the spirit, the symbolic refuge where 
the wedding of the senses and the will is to be cele- 
brated. The statues, the paintings — all the plastic 
effort of tlie intelligence — is used to decorate it. The 



Athens (about 415 B.C.). Eivchtcion, portico of the 
Curyatids, (k-talt 



detail of its construction is the personal language of 
the architect. Its principle is always the same, its 
proportions are always similar, it is the same spirit 
that calculates and balances its lines. Here the Doric 
genius dominates, bj- the austere unornamented col- 
umn, broad and short; there the Ionic geniu.s smiles 
in it, through the long column, graceful as a jet of 
water and gently expanded at its summit. Some- 



Athens (cnil of v Ci-ntiiry). Viclory. fragment of the balus- 
trade of the temple of Atlitna Nike (Museum of the Aa-opolU). 



180 ANC lENT ART 

times young girls, inclining toward one another as 
they walk, balance the architrave on their heads, like 
a basket of fruit. Often it has columns on only one 
or two faces; at other times they surround it entirely. 
Whether it is large or small, its size is never thought 
of. We are tempted to say that the law of Number, 
which it observes with such ease, is innate with it; 
one would say that the law springs from this very soil 
as the shafts rise in their vertical flight between the 
stvlobate and the architrave, that it is the law itself 
which halts them, and which hangs suspended in the 
pediment with a sort of motionless balance. The 
law of Number easily places the temple in the scale of 
the material and spiritual universe of which it is the 
complete expression. It is on a plane with the pure 
gulf which, at its base, rounds a curve formed by the 
cadenced wave that comes to sweep the blond sand. 
It is on a plane with its own promontory, which turn:» 
violet or mauve according to the hour, but is always 
defined against space by a continuous line, which the 
bony structure of the earth marks out distinctly. It 
is on a plane with the day sky, which outlines the 
regularity of its rectangle in the ring of the horizon 
of the sea. It is on a plane with the night sky which 
turns about it according to the musical and monotonous 
rhythm in which the architect has discovered the 
secret of its proportions. It is on a plane with the 
city, for which it realizes, with a strange serenity, the 
perfect equilibrium vainly sought by its citizens in the 
essential antagonism of classes and parties. 

It is on a plane with the poets and thinkers, who 



PHIDL\S 181 

seek tlic absolute relationship between the heart and 
the intelligence in tragedy and dialogue, to which it 
is related by the drama of its sculptural decoration, 
irrevocably inscribed in its definite order. On the 



Atbenb (end of the V Centur.v). Temple of the Winged 

Victory. 

simple Acropolis it is a harmony that crowns another 
harmony. After twenty -five centuries it remains 
what it was, because it has retained its proportions, 
its sustained sweep, its strong seat on the great slabs 
of stone that dominate the sea surrounded by golden 
hills. One might say that the years have treated it 
as they have treated the earth, despoiling it of its 
statues and of its colors at the same time that they 
have carried the forests and the soil of the mountains 
down to the sea and dried up the torrents. One might 



182 ANCIENT ART 

say that the years have I)uriK'<l it iis they have burned 
tlie skeleton of tlie soil whieh «rrops out everjwhere 
under the reddish grass — that eight hundred thousand 
days of flame have penetrated it to niuke it tower 
over the conflagration of tlie evening, seeming to 
mount e\'en higher tlie lower the sim de.s<»>nds. 

If one has not hved in the întînuiey of its ruins, one 
thinks the Greek temple as rigid as a theorem. But 
as soon as we really know it — whether ahnost intaet 
or shattered — our whole humanity trembles in it. 
The reason is that from its base to its summit the 
theorem bears the trace of the hand. As in the pedi- 
ments, the symmetry is only apparent, but e<)uilibrium 
reigns and makes it live. The laws of sculpture, the 
laws of nature, are found in it, with logic, the energj' 
and silence of tlie planes, the (Cliver of their surfaces. 
The straight line is there, as solid as reason, the spa- 
cious curved line also, reposeful as the dream. The 
architect secures the stability of the edifice by its 
rectangular forms, he gives it movement by its hidden 
curves. The sweep of the columns is oblique; they 
project a little, one beyond the other, like the trees of 
an avenue. An insensible curve rounds off the archi- 
trave at the line of their suiiiniit. All these imper- 
ceptible divergences, with the fluting of the columns — 
a shell which breaks the light, a stream of shadow and 
of fire — animate the temple, give to it something like 
>i,„ i,.,„i:„.. „* ., in-iirt. Its pillars possess the strength 
of trees; the pediments and the friezes 
2 branches. The edifice, hi<lden behind 
the columns, resembles the mysterious 



UsiiPHI (end of the v Century). Capital of the dancers 
{Museum qf Delphi). 



184 ANCIENT ART 

forest which opens at the moment one enters it. The 
temple of Pœstum, which is quite black, has the 
appearance of an animal walking. 

Thus, from the living temple to the eternal men who 
people its pediments and march in the circle of its 
friezes, Greek art is a melody. Man's action is fused 
with his thought. Art comes from him, as does his 
glance, his voice, and his breath, in a kind of conscious 
enthusiasm; which is the true religion. So lucid a 
faith exalts him that he has no need to cry it forth. 
His lyrism is contained, because he knows the reason 
of its existence. His certitude is that of the regular 
force which causes torrents of desire and the flowers 
to spring from beings and from the soil. And the 
Apollo, who arises from the pediment of Olympia with 
the calm and the sweep of the sun as it passes the 
horizon, and whose resplendent gesture dominates the 
furj- of the crowds, is like the spirit of this race which, 
for a second, felt the reign over the chaos that surrounds 
us, of the order inherent within us. 

A second ! no longer, doubtless, and we cannot 

determine its place. It is mysterious, it escapes our 

attempt to measure it, as do all human works in which 

intuition plays the larger part. Did it perhaps burst 

out in a lost work, perhaps in several works at once? 

Toward the middle of the fifth century, from the 

sculptor of Olympia to Phidias, between the rise and 

occurs in the whole soul of Greece an 

lation round about this unseizable 

h passed without her being able to 

it she lived it, and one or two men 



PHIDIAS 185 

expressed it. And that is the maximum that tC living 
humanity has a right to demand of the dead human- 
ities. It is not by following them that it will resemble 
them. It may seek and discover in itself the elements 
of a new equilibrium. But a mode of equilibrium 
cannot be rediscovered. 



i (?), (v to IV Centuries?). {I'lTWjh.) 



PoLïcLEiTus {soluiol of). Torso of a man fightin 



TirB AcillH"OLI8 OF pBRIiAAIUM. 



Chapter \T ÏIIK DUSK OF ^UNKIND 




IIK heroic soul of Greece was to ebb away 
through tliree wounds: the triumph of 
Sparta, the enr chinent of Atliens, and. 
the reign of intellectualisin. Sensibility 
increased at the expense of moral energj', 
reason overflowed faith, enthusiasm was dulled through 
contact with the critical spirit. The philosophers, to 
whose development sculpture had contributed so much 
by giving life to ideas, were to deny their origin, laugh 
at the poets and at the artists, and discourage the 
sculptors through misleading their minds in the mean- 
ders of sophistrj". We need not bear them a grudge 
for this. .The equilibrium was about to break; no 
human power, no niiraele could have re-established it. 



188 ANCIENT ART 

And the soul of Athens, on the brink of the abyss to 
which her logicians were dragging civilization, was 
even then forging a tool with which the men of a dis- 
tant future could build a new dwelling. The death 
struggle of Greece gave us freedom of examination. 

Beginning with the last years of the fifth century, a 
furtive caress passed over the Greek marbles. The 
great forms, kept alive by the circulation of their inner 
energies, disappeared from the pediments, and the 
artist tried to call these energies to the surface of the 
statues, of the portraits, of the picturesque groups 
which, however, he isolated little by little. The form 
and the spirit, which up to that time had flowered in 
the same integral expression, now separated from 
each other irrevocably. The spiritualist searched 
the body to extract the soul, the skeptic no longer tried 
to derive from it anything more than sensual satis- 
factions. About that time a little temple was built 
on the Acropolis to house a wingless Victory. But 
the external victories that had descended upon it 
had kept their wings. They were to depart from 
Athens. 

Greek sculpture is supposed not to have appreciated 
the inner life until the fourth century. It might be 
observed that from the Archaic period onward there 
are statues, like the Samian woman, or like any Orante 
of the Acropolis, whose visage makes us think of that 
of the Gothic virgins because of their naïve enchant- 
ment with life which illumines it from within. But 
that is not the question. People generally believe 
that thought cannot dwell anywhere save in the head 



EpiDAURua (beginning of the iv Century B.C.)- Victory of 

the Acmterium of the temple uf Esculapiiis 

{National Miueum, Athens). 



190 



ANCIENT ART 



of the model. The truth is that it is entirely in the 
head of the artist. The inner quality of a work is 
measured by the quality of the relations which unite 
its elements and assure the continuity of its ensemble. 
And no art had more of the inner quality than that of 
the fifth century. The 
modeling of everything 
goes from within outward. 
The surfaces, the move- 
ments, the empty spaces 
themselves, everything is 
determined by the play 
of the profound forces 
that pass from the artist 
into the material, as the 
blood passes from the 
heart into the limbs and 
the brain. 

It is true that in a poor 
societj', where the slave 
was well treated, where 
the steps of the social hier- 
archy were very near together, one which lived on an In- 
dulgent soil, in a health-giving air, near a flowered sea, 
human beings did not have an urgent need of one 
another. The normal expression of man is a resultant 
of the daily conflict of his passions and his will. The 
Greek sculptor knew the sentimental agitations whose 
reflections pass at times over the sternest among 
human faces. But it was only later, with the definitive 
breaking of the social rhythm, that these reflections 



Praxfteles (pnd of iv Cen- 
tury). Ht-rmos. detail 

[Museum of Olympia). 



LrsiPPttB (school of). Ephebe, bronze, detail 
{National Miaeam, Athene). 



192 ANCIENT ART 

were imprinted there as indelible traces. Man, who 
was then to be characterized by a warped, suffering 
body and a haggard face, was defined for Phidias by a 
complete organic equilibrium wherein the calm of the 
heart spread through the harmony of the general 
structure, of which the tranquil face was only one 



ScoPAs {35i). The Mausoleum, detail {British Mmeum). 

element. The head of the Lapith woman, that of 
Peitho, and that of the Artemis of the Parthenon 
express a profound life, but a peaceful one. It is like 
a groat depth of pure water, full and limpid and 
unrufflc<I. The world does not yet know water for- 
ever plowetl bj- the storm, blackened by the poisonous 
mia.sma.s that slept in it. 

Praxiteles draws the spirit to the skin of the statues. 
As he sees the spirit floating on faces as an undefined 
smile, as a vague disquietude, as a luminous shadow, 
he fixes it there, and by so doing breaks that unity 



PilAXiTEi£fl (srhiMil iif), (end of Uip iv Ccntiirv). 
Ai:lirodite (Mu»fum of Xaplea). 



194 ANCIENT ART 

which gîves to the forms of the great century their 
contained radiance. To express the inner life he 
seeks to make it external. And it is no longer as a 
dawn, it is as an evening, that the soul mounts from 
the depths to spread itself over the surface. Prax- 
iteles is the Euripides of sculpture. His measure, 
his elegance, his mind, the subtlety of his animation, 
and the charm of his analysis do not succeed in hiding 
from us the fact that he doubts his strength, and that, 
at bottom, he regrets having lost the sacred intoxica- 
tion at which he laughs. Under his fingers the plane 
gets soft, hesitates, and gradually loses the spiritual 
energy with which Phidias invested it. The expression 
of the form, distraught and as if a little wearied,* is 
no longer the play of the inner forces, but that of the 
lights and shadows on its shell. The soul seeks to 
escape from the embrace of the marble. One sees 
this clearly in the great dreamy foreheads under the 
wavy hair, in the sensual and vibrant mouth, in the 
undefined charm of the face as it leans forward. That 
no longer means intelligence; that means sentiment. 
Art dies of it, but new life takes its germ from it and, 
much later and under other skies, is to flower from it. 
At the moment when human language and enthusiasm 
weaken together, the work of Praxiteles aflSrms, not 
the apf>earance, but the survival of the mind and a 
kind of transference of its function, which is to spend 
many long centuries in searching for its real organ 
and in the end is to find it. 

His art betrays the coming of a kind of cerebral 
sensualism which we see appearing at the same hour 



THE DUSK OF MANKIND 195 

among all his contemporaries, to whom the friezes of 
the temple of the "Wingless Victory" and the capital 
of the "Dancers" at Delphi had already shown the 
way. Little by little, the deep structure is forgotten. 



Niobide, copy (it to m Century B.C.). 
{Banque Commereùde, Rome.) 

SO that the surface of the figures may be caressed by 
desire, as the surface of the faces is marked by the 
artist's effort to depict psychological states. When 
the statue remains clothed, the robes become lighter 
than a breeze on the water. But, for the first time, 



196 ANCIENT ART 

the Greek sculptor wholly unveils woman, whose form 
is significant more especially through the tremor of 
its surface, just as the masculine form, which had 
dictated his science to him, is above all significant 
through the logic and the rigor of its structure. For 
the first time he rejects the stuffs which the pupils 
of Phidias had begun to drape in every direction, at 
the risk of leaving unexpressed the life moving under 
them. It is without veils that he expresses the move- 
ment of the torsos as they draw themselves up to their 
full stature, the animation of the planes which the 
light and air model in powerful vibration, the youth 
of breasts, the vigor of masculine bellies, and the pure 
thrust of arms and legs. He speaks of the body of 
woman as it had never been spoken of before, he 
raises it up and adores it in its radiant warmth, its 
firm undulations, in its splendor as a living column 
through which the sap of the world circulates with 
its blood. These mutilated statues confer on the 
sensuality of man the highest nobility. Full and 
pure, like a well of light, intrusted by all their profiles 
to space which is motionless about them, as if filled 
with respect, these great forms sanctify the whole of 
paganism as, later, a mother bending over the dead 
body of her son is to humanize Christianity. And if 
we are intimately grateful to Praxiteles and regard 
him with a tenderness which does not resemble the 
heroic exaltation to which Phidias transports us, it 
is because he has taught us that the feminine body, by 
its rise into the light and the affecting frailty of the 
belly, the sides, and the breasts in which our whole 



THE DUSK OF MANKIND 197 

future sleeps, sums up human efiPort in the uncon- 
querable idealism with which it faces so many storms. 
It is impossible to see certain of these broken statues 
where only the young torso and the long thighs sur- 
vive, without being torn by a tenderness that is sacred. 



n 

But the early fervor is soon to be transformed; 
something a little wearied is to touch the force of the 
marble. Very quickly the forms lengthen, become 
more slender, flow like a single caress, and tremble 
with sensual agitation, with shame invaded by love. 
The modeling undulates gently, the passage becomes 
insistent, insinuates itself, and, little by little, effaces 
the plane. Wandering hollows dapple the skin, the 
breasts are uncertain flowers which never quite open, 
the neck swells as if with sighs, the knot of hair secured 
by the fillets weighs on the beautiful round head over 
which the tresses course like a stream. As at the end 
of Egypt, it is the troubled farewell to woman, a fare- 
well in which sleeps the hope of distant resurrections. 
Look, after seeing the "Victories," after the "Dancers" 
of Delphi — so natural in their grace that they make 
one think of a tuft of reeds — ^look at the "Leda" as 
she stands to receive the great swan with the beating 
wings, letting the beak seize her neck, tfie foot tighten 
on her thigh — the trembling woman subjected to the 
fatal force which reveals to her the whole of life, even 
while penetrating her with voluptuousness and pain. 
And that is still religious, grave, barely infected by 



198 ANCIENT ART 

heady agitation, barely turning towards the slope of 
sensual abandon — it is like the adieu of Greece to the 
noble Ufe of the pagans. The heroic era of paganism 



Macn'a Gilecia (end o( the iv Century). Psyche 
of Capua {Mvaeum of Naples). 

begins its death struggle with a smile that is a little 
melanchoiy, but tender and resigned. It seems as 
if this admirable race had had a feeling of the rela- 



Hellenistic Art (iv to m Centuries). Aphrodite of Cj-re 
detail {National Museum, Rotne). 






200 ANCIENT ART 

tivity of our knowledge and as if it had accepted the 
beginning of its decline as simply as it had accepted 
its dawn. 

Thus, through criticism and sensuality, Greece came 
to study the actual man and to forget the possible man. 
Lysippus began again to cast athletes in bronze, mus- 
cular and calm young men, whose immediate life, no 
longer the inner one, goes no deeper than their rippling 
skin. The form, indeed, is always full and pure; it is 
dense and unsettled, but coherent, and has the look 
of a thing conceived as a whole. When these athletes j( 
left the stadium they seemed to descend from the 
temple, so well did the serenity, the assurance of their 
strength, still concentrate in them. But the hieratic 
idea of the first periods of sculpture, the divine idea 
of the great centurjs no longer interposed between 
them and the statue maker, who saw them directly. 
At the same time and by the same means he turned 
his sculpture toward those character portraits which, 
in reality, we know only by the Roman copies. The 
earlier ones — that of Homer, for example — reveal to us 
disenchanted nobility, discriminating fineness and 
reserve. But later we find fever, excessive sensitive- 
ness, and virtuosity in description. It is a movement, 
moreover, which announces the gravest social crisis. 
Art is no longer a function of the race; it begins to 
make itself dependent on the rich man, who is to turn 
it away from its heroic course more and more, to 
demand of it portraits and statues for apartments 
and gardens. 

The last of the great monuments of the classic epoch, 



THE DUSK OF MANKIND 201 

the Mausoleum of Scopas and Bryaxis, is made for a 
private individual. King Mausolus, and, by an irony 
which partakes of the symbolic, this monument is a 



Hellenistic Art (iv to in Century). Aphrodite 
of ZonaglU (Louvre). 

tomb. It is living, certainly — nervous, sparkling, 
and impregnated with intelligence. In the warriors, 
in tlie Amazons and their horses, in the races, the 
flights, and the attacks, there circulates a free, proud. 



202 ANCIENT ART 

and delicate spirit, a rapidity of thought which almost 
forestalls the action, which brings into the material 
the resonance of the armor, the neighing of the horses, 
the sound of their hoofs beating on the ground, and of 
the vibrations of javelins and tightly drawn bow- 
strings. The chisel attacks the marble with the con- 
quering fire of a too ardent mind in anxious haste to 
set down at the flood tide of its excitation, an enthu- 
siasm already tainted with doubt. With its extreme 
elegance of form, its sharp mordant expression, and 
its direct gesture, it is a cool breeze that crosses an 
early evening. There are constant parallelisms be- 
tween fold and fold, between limb and limb, between 
movement and movement. The empty spaces are 
very empty, we no longer fee! the passage of that 
abstract wave through which the volumes penetrated 
one another and, from end to end of the pediment, 
gave the effect of a sea whose crests brought with them 
the hollows — which heave to a crest again. The hol- 
low is isolated here, the wave is isolated; picturesque 
and descriptive detail profits by this dissociation to 
appear and impose itself. It is to tend, more and 
more, to predominate over the philosophic ensemble. 

The evolution of the great periods is approximately 

the same everywhere; but in Greece from the seventh 

to the third century it appears with an astonishing 

relief. Man, when he realizes himself, proceeds like 

-«t..™ f-^m anarchy to unity, from unity to anarchy. 

scattered elements have to seek one another 

mess of the mind. Then the whole mass of 

; creature is weighed down by the soil, which 



THE DUSK OF MANKIND 203 

clogs its joints and clings to its heavy steps. Then 
the forms disengage themselves and find their proper 
places and agreement; their logical relationships 
appear, and each organ adapts itself more and more 
closdy to its function. In the end the rhythm is 



Homer, bronze 
{Arefurological Museum, Florence). 

broken, form seems to flee from form, the mind seems 
to wander at random, the contacts are lost, the unity 
disintegrates. Thus there are in Greek art four definite 
epochs: the Primitives, ^Egina, the Parthenon, the 
Mausoleum. First, the stammering analysis followed, 
with the Archaic men, hy a brief and rough synthesis. 
Then, when the mind is mature, a new and short analysis, 
liuninous and compelling, which ends, with a single 
bound, in the conscious synthesis of a society in equi- 



204 ANCIENT ART 

lîbrîum. Finally, a last research which is not to reach 
its goal, which is to dissipate itself more and more 
until it has reduced its fragments ad infinitum^ has 
broken all the old bonds, and has, little by little, lost 
itself through lack of comprehension, fatigue, and 
the urgent need of a great, new power of feeling. 

His forgetting of the essential relations causes the 
artist to become concerned over the accident, the 
rare movement, the exceptional expression, the momen- 
tary action and, most of all — when men turn back to 
the horizon of the mystical, the artist's solicitude takes 
the form of looking for fright, pain, delirium, for phys- 
ical sufifering, and sentimental impulses of all kinds. 
The plastic synthesis undergoes the same disintegra- 
tion. It is then that detail appears; it tyrannizes 
over the artist. The attribute invades the form. The 
latter gesticulates in vain as if it wanted to defend 
itself, the attribute rivets itself on like a chain. Lyres, 
tridents, scepters, lightnings, draperies, sandals, head- 
dresses — the whole rag bag of the studios and the 
theatrical dressing-room makes its entrance. The 
deep lyrism of the soul subsides, there is need for an 
external lyrism to mask its exhaustion. It was enthu- 
siasm that made the statue divine; how is the god 
to be recognized now if he has no scepter and no 
crown? Faith uplifted the material and made light- 
ning flash from it to the very heavens of human hope. 
That is over with. The statues need wings. In the 
fifth century the wing was rare on the shoulders of 
the gods. It was to be found among the Archaics as 
they tried to tear form from the chains of matter. It 



Demeter of Ciiidus (end of iv Century). [Briliak Museum.) 



«06 ANCIENT ART 

is found among the decadents where it tries to raise 
the fonn, whose own ardor no longer sustains it. 
The "Victory of Samothrace" already has need of 
wings to rise fripm the prow of the ship, because of the 



Heu^.nistic Art (m Century B.C.)- Sarcophagus of 
Alexander {Miiteum of ConMànlinopU). 

complication of the wet draperies which weigh on her 
l^s and make heavy her terrible sweep, the turn of 
her bust, and the tempest of flight, of clarions, and of 
the wind that rises in her wake. 



Greek art, at the very moment that it was thus 
breaking up in depth, was scattering over the whole 
material' surface of Hellenic antiquity. After the 
movement of concentration that had brought to 
Athens all the forces of Hellenism, a movement of 
dispersal began, which was to carry from Athens to 
southern Italy, to Sicily, to Cyrenaica, Egypt, the 
Islands, and Asia Minor the passion and, unfortunately, 
the mania, for beautiful things — -in default of creative 



Magna Gracia (hi Century B.C.)- Aphrodite, detail 
{Mtueum of Syracvêe). 



208 ANCIENT ART 

genius. Dilettantism and the dififusion of taste mul- 
tiply and at the same time weaken talent. It is the 
Hellenistic period, perhaps the richest in artists and 
in wprks of art that history has to show, but perhaps, 
also, one of the poorest in power of emotion. 

There are few men to listen to the voice withm them 
now, and, in a brief rush of fervor, occasionally to 
catch from it — like the vigorous sculptor of the Venus 
of Milo — a very noble, if somewhat dulled and dis- 
united, echo of the hymn to life whose triumphal choir 
dies out in the past. The adroit and active author 
of the "Sarcophagus of Alexander" takes the sub- 
jects of the old Assyrian sculpture, for lack of its science, 
and transforms its force and its brutality into some- 
what declamatory lyrical movement. The* sculptors 
of Rhodes, especially, seek gesticulating and compli- 
cated melodrama in the sensational event and in liter- 
ature, so that they may be surer to touch popular 
sentiment, which is beginning its reaction against the 
skepticism of the philosophers. Others, who cannot 
see significance in the normal manifestations of life, 
lure the patron by making their work tell anecdotes 
for him. We reach the irritating reign of the pictur- 
esque little groups. They are still charming sculpture, 
to be sure, of a learned and witty elegance, but without 
the naive quality, and already announce monotonous 
factory work, trinkets, art for the amateur, and those 
coffins of the artistes dignity, the glass case, the shelf, 
and the collection. 

These undefined currents, dominated by the senti- 
mentalism of the middle classes and the elegant lassi- 



THE DUSK OF MANKIND 209 

tude of the blasé, act one on another, in harmony or in 
opposition, and follow or push back in every direction 
the hesitating wave that goes from the shores of Asia 
to the tihores of Egypt, from Pergamos to Alex- 



Sleeping Fury (ill Century B.C.) 

(National Mmeum. Rome.) 

andria, from the Islands to the three continents. The 
incessant mixing of the populations of the coasts 
produces a wild maelstrom in which some waves from 
the depths, bringing back the violence and heaviness 
of Asia, arouse the passion of humanity to the point 
of desperation. But the Greek soul is no longer any- 
thing but a foam evaporating on the surface. Man 
has lost his unity. His efforts to seize it again only 
plunge him into deeper night. The AKar of Pergamos, 



210 ANCIENT ART 

the last of the great collective designs that Hellenism 
has bequeathed to us, is the image of this disorder. 
Where sobriety had been, there is heavy luxuriance; 
confusion replaces order; the rhythm grows wild and 
breathless; melodramatic effort stifles all humanity, 
and oratorical power becomes emphasis and bombast. 
The artist, in the abundance of his speech, exhibits 
the noisy emptiness of his mind. His speech is ardent, 
without doubt, sumptuous in color, trembling with his 
clamor and his gesture, but it is a little like a mantle 
loaded with gold and gems that has been caught by 
the wind. Scopas had, at least, no fear of open spaces 
in his groups; he was too much alive; the sap of the 
primitive had not abandoned him; when he had 
nothing to say he held his peace. But the sculptor 
of Pergamos is afraid of those great silences through 
which the spirit of Phidias, when it left one form to 
go toward another, glided on its invisible wave. The 
sense of spiritual continuity is so foreign to him that 
he does not hesitate to replace it by the factitious 
continuity of external rhetoric. He fills the back- 
grounds, stuffs the holes, and chokes up every bit of 
space that he can find. When a man has little to say, 
he talks without a stop. Silence bores only those who 
do not think. 

These screams, these imploring eyes, these desperate 
gestures correspond with the awakening neither of 
pain nor of pity. Suffering is as old as the mind. The 
men of the past were not ignorant of the dramas of 
love, or the dramas of paternity, or the dramas of war, 
or of abandonment, or of death; but they knew how 



THE DUSK OF MANKIND 211 

to gather from them an increase of power. When 
man loves life he dominates and utilizes pain. It is 
when he no longer acts that tears rule the world. The 
lachrymose heroes and the epileptic gods no longer 
have in them anything of the Greek aoul; they no 



Pergamum (beginning of the u CenturyJ. Altar 
{Muaeum of Berlin). 

longer have anything of the human soul. It escapes 
through the bellowing mouths, the hair standing on 
end, the tips of the fingers, the points of the spears, 
and through the gestures that fritter it away. The 
world is ripe to adopt the antagonistic dualism that 
later is to tear civilization to pieces. Here is earth, 
there is heaven; here is the form, there is the spirit- 
They are forbidden to rejoin each other, to recognize 
themselves in each other, Man is to wander despair- 
ingly for ten or twelve centuries in the night that falls 
between them. Already the authors of the melodra- 
matic groups of the "Laocoon," the "Famese Bull," 



212 ANCIENT ART 

and the romantic suicides are no longer sculptors, but 
bombastic play-actors. Feeling, which is to be reborn 
in the crowds, is dead in the image cutters, who have 
been domesticated by the powerful. Even their 
science is dead. The statue maker is hardly more 
than a diligent anatomist, who follows exactly the 
relief of the muscles and the dramatized movement 
that fashion prescribes for his model. Sculpture does 
not even think of recovering something of the lost 
paradise through divine irony, for which it is not made. 
But through irony Lucian of Samosate is to console 
minds from which pitiless rationalism has driven out 
faith. The gods have deserted the souls of the artists 
to dwell in the hearts of stoics, who welcome them 
without a word. 

IV 

There is to be, indeed, during this slow, irremediable 
wasting away of the Greek idea, some moments where 
the decline is arrested, some startled gestures revealing 
a momentary return of vitality; occasionally a few 
green shoots come from the old transplanted tree. 
Nothing dies without a struggle. Upon coming into 
contact with newer races, the Hellenic genius, ashamed 
of its decay, attempts a vigorous return to itself here 
and there, and if it does not bring the gods back to 
earth, it sees, living on the earth, a few heroic forms 
around the flourishing cities and the illumined bays. 
To follow its infiltrations through the Latins of northern 
Italy and the Latinized colonies of the valley of the 
Ehone is rather difficult, the more so because, from the 



Damofuon (begranîng of the ii Century). Artemis of Lycosoura 
{Naiional Mtueum, Atheni). 



214 ANCIENT ART 

• 

origins of Greek civilization. Magna Graecia had not 
ceased to cultivate thought, to cut marble, and to 
cast bronze. Psestum in its swamps, and the temples 
of Sicily on their soil of lava and sulphur, where the 
herds of goats wander amid the cactus, bear witness 
to the fact that a collective power reigned. It was 
triumphant over wars, it defined the idealism of the 
race even more than it did the character of the cities. 
The evolution of the Hellenic desire had been every- 
where the same. Magna Graecia had bared its god- 
desses to discover the woman in them at the same 
moment that Praxiteles had. i But perhaps it had 
grown soft more quickly, as if submerged in volup- 
tuous and enervating luxury. Southern Italy was 
richer than Greece, more fertile, less rugged, and more 
generously supplied with orange trees, with flowers, 
and with breezes. The beautiful statues of Capua 
have the fluidity of perfumed oils and the polish of the 
skin of courtesans; they are without any strength of 
their own, their modeling melts and flows like wax. 
Jlome had little trouble in subjecting those who lived 
among them. 

But it happened that at the contact of Roman 
energy the Greek element recovered a certain dignity. 
For two centuries, approximately, from the period 
when Greece, not yet conquered, but already resigned, 
sent artists to Rome, until the period when, entirely 
vanquished, she furnished only panderers, sophists, 
and rhetoricians — from the "Seated Pugilist" to the 
"Hercules of the Belvedere" — there was a strange 
union of the violent Latin strength and the Hellenic 



THE DUSK OF MANKIND 215 

mind, purified and made subtle by the approach of 
death. And from this marriage came fruits at once 
so tart and so ripe that before them Michael Angelo 



Myrina. The Vintage, bas-relief {Louvre). 

could have recognized — and did recognize — ^his power. 
These are singular works, like full green oaks that 
have been struck by lightning. We do not know 
whether they are Roman, because of the hilly modeling, 
the exaggerated expressiveness of the projections, and 
the tense brutality; or Greek? because of the mastery 
that fixes all these qualities in coherent form, that 
draws forth and distributes the spirit of the form. 



216 ANCIENT ART 

The accord between the inner hfe of the recreated 
oi^ganism and its mode of meeting with the light on its 
surface is complete. In these works instinct is dom- 
inated by inteUigence, and must follow wherever and 



Hellenistic Art. Bacchus and Ariadne. 

Sarcophagus, fragment {Louvre). 

however intelligence directs it. It wa.s surely Latin- 
ized Greeks in Sicily who dug out from the rocks, 
which look toward the sparkling sea, those marble 
amphitheaters where the shepherds sat beside the 
gods. It was Latinized Greeks who built and dec- 
orated Pompeii. It was Latinized Greeks, saturated 
with that concrete poetrj- which the French soil 
infuses in those whom it nourishes, who built Aries 



Grcco-Roman Art.' Puf;ilist, bronze (ii Century B.C.}- 
{National Museum, Rome.) 



218 ANCIENT ART 

and Nîmes and surprised those beautiful women at 
the bath as they crouch on one leg which flattens 
under the weight of the torso, with its soft breasts, 
the fat fold at the belly, and the hollow in the small 
of the back, where the shadow moves with the undu- 
lating surface. At Rome itsçlf, under Augustus, with 
the Roman copyists all around him, Pasiteles founded 
a Greek school. And it was in Rome, under his leader- 
ship and as an evident reaction against Asiatic sculp- 
ture, that the Greek sculptors attempted an impossible 
return to Archaic austerity.* Everywhere else, in 
Attica, in Asia, and in the Islands, Hellenism reacts 
in only a negative way against the sea of sentimentalism 
that arises from the depths. 



But it still discusses, it wrangles, and, let us add, 
it tries, in the wreck of its spirit, to bequeathe the 
essential lesson of that spirit — if not by the language 
of form which it scarcely knows any longer, at least 
by words. About the first century the whole civiliza- 

* I believe that the famous throne of Venus (of the Museo Nazionale in 
Rome), the central element of which serves as the headpiece to the Introduc- 
tion to this book, and which has heretofore been attributed to the fifth cen- 
tury,must be restored to this school, of wliich it would be the masterpiece. Not 
to mention the place where it was discovered, not to speak of the nude figure 
in it — which, by the way, is inferior to the rest of the work — and which 
the artists of the fifth century would not have ventured to use, there 
are some strange details in it like the pillows, a certain negligence of style, 
a certain fashionable elegance, a certain technical cleverness, a spirit more 
elegant and refined than grave, a mixture of exquisite culture and volun- 
tary naïveté, a shade of literature very far from the force and the austerity 
of the predecessors of Phidias. 



THE DUSK OP MANKIND 219 

tion of antiquity concentrates around Alexandria, as if 
to take an inventory of its conquests. The Egj-ptian, 
in his weariness, is at the back of the stage, but the 



Hellenistic Art. Eros and Psyche {Louvre). 

Jew and the Greek stand before the audience, applauded 
or hooted, friends or enemies. Now alone, now fol- 
lowed by fanatical multitudes, they work in the fever. 



220 ANCIENT ART 

the trepidation, and the clamor of a ceaselessly jostling 
and renewed cosmopolitanism. On a bed of abject 
vices^of intensified asceticisms,. among micompromising 
mystics and indulgent skeptics, the idea ferments. 
Philosophers, critics, romancers, theologians, rheto- 
ricians, artists — this whole world mingles together and 
shouts. The artist goes in for theology, the philosopher 
for romances, the theologian for criticism, the romancer 
for rhetoric. It is a unique moment in the history of 
mankind; Egypt contributes its mystery, Greece its 
reason, Asia its god. And in spite of Eg5''pt, Greece, 
and Asia, the synthesis of the ancient world, that is to 
be effected in the too aristocratic domain of the mind 
by the enthusiasm of the prophets and the subtlety 
of the sophists,' is to pass over the mass of humanity 
without satisfying the hunger of its needs. The world 
is wearied with thinking, it tempers its unsettlec^ ideal 
in its primitive element once more — in the innocence 
of the people. A new mythology is to triumph over 
the philosophers, who are preparing its imfolding. 

Social surroundings such as these do not permit belief 
in a great Alexandrian art, which would have been lost. 
Neither strong architecture nor great sculpture reposes 
on systems, especially when the systems interpenetrate 
and vary incessantly. The source of plastic inspira- 
tion hïid dried up in the too complicated mind of the 
upper classes and had not yet appeared in the dark 
soul of the people. At Alexandria, as at other places, 
there were admirable renewals, spiritual leaps as 
straight as those of a dying flame, the gleams of a deep 
love. Certain bas-reliefs of Alexandrian, Greco-Latin, 



Greco-Rouan Art, Apollonios (i Century B.C.). Her- 
cules uf the Belvedere {Museum of the Vaikan). 



222 ANCIENT ART 

or Hellenistic origin — the matter is of little importance 
for the same spirit insinuates itself everywhere — 
certain bas-reliefs seize upon us through the liveliness 
and the grace — the joy rescued from intellectual 
pessimism, the ardent abandon to the intoxication of 
enjoyment through understanding, and of understand- 
ing through enjoyment. The fruit of the vineyard is 
ripe, the vintagers gather it, to the sound of flute and 
cymbals; they dance on the grapes. A long, long 
winter may come. The round of the dancers grows 
wilder, the hair of the women streams, their heaving 
bosoms and their legs are bared, the panthers creep 
through the shadows to lick up the blood that is to 
flow. But this epoch, in which Egyptian hieratism 
often comes to tempt the dying inspiration of the 
Greek, cultivates *' genre" sculpture, which is the 
unmistakable mark, on the dust of the centuries, 
of baseness and vulgarity of mind. These sculp- 
tors surprise the questionable professions in their 
picturesque adventures; they tell little stories that 
make you laugh or cry. It is the Japanese bibelot, 
done with far less skill, or the clock-top of the lower 
middle classes of our century with far more skill and 
not much more wit. The greater part of the bas-reliefs 
exhibit the same tendencies, the often confused and 
overloaded anecdote, and a background of landscape 
as its setting. They show how sculpture was cor- 
rupted in the Ptolemaic periods by the studies and 
method of painters. And that is the most serious of 
the social indications that can be found in this art. 
This need of fusing the two great modes of plastic 



THE DUSK OF MANKIND «23 

evocation had been appearing in Greece itself for at 
least three centuries. Praxiteles looked on form as a 
painter rather than as a sculptor; Lysippus, also, at 
times, and the sculptor of the "Tomb of Alexander," 
and especially the decorator 
of Pergamos. The great 
classic sculpture had indeed 
made Qse of painting, but as 
an accessory means, to give 
to the form, already living 
through its own structure, 
the superficial appearance of 
life. Under the broad, simple 
tones which covered the deco- 
rative ensembles and re- 
mained tranquil in the light, 
the sculptural plane per- 
sisted. On the contrarj', 
the fourth century, and very 
much more in the Hellenistic 
periods, pictorial expression 
tends to get along without form and to model the 
surfaces by the mysterious play of the lights, the 
shadows, the half-tones, and the diffused envelope 
of the air. It is still a legitimate process when it 
is practiced on bas-relief, but it is fatal to sculpture. 
Form must live in space by its own means, like the 
living being. The planes determined by its inner 
life are the exact criterion of the statue's success 
or failure in its contact with the outside atmosphere. 
An envelope is necessary only to the painter, since 



Au:xANDRiAN Art. Head 

of a woman 

{Laffan CoUectùm). 



224 ANCIENT ART 

he transfers conventionally, to a flat surface, the 
materiality and the depth of space. If the sculptor 
incorporates an artificial atmosphere with form, the 
real atmosphere will devour it. 

In the epoch of Alexandria the confusion is complete. 
The mystics of Asia and the skeptics of Europe, wearied 
by their skepticism, need the vague envelope that 
destroys form and opens dreams as vague as itself. 
The great sculpture of Egj'pt, even while retaining its 
strong traditions, had already, in the Saite epoch, 
headed for these cloudv horizons. The anecdote sur- 
rounded by the mystery of painting, indeed the whole 
of Greek art from Praxiteles onward, tends toward 
them. Grandeur of sentiment having disappeared, 
sentimentalism, a new thing, was bound to germinate 
in the pain of the masses and the indecision of the 
intellectuals, to renew the energy of the world. It is 
onlv in these tendencies that we can find in Alexandrian 
art an attempt, even if an obscure one, to fuse the 
essential aspirations of the ideals of the ancient world. 

The ideal of the Jew is justice. It is a limited and 
exclusive ideal, and, for that reason, uncompromising 
and hard. Like every excess of passion, the passion 
for justice, when it has no counterpoise, renders man 
unjust toward those who do not think as he does, and 
unjust toward himself, for his thought knows no other 
refuge than daily sacrifice and pitiless severity. He 
is unhappy and alone, for he is unacquainted with 
forgiveness. The ideal of the Greek is wisdom, the 
order of the world obeyed and disciplined by the intel- 
ligence, the conquest — patient and undivorced from 



Gallo-Hellenic Art (i Ctnlurv A.D.). Crouching Venus 
(.Lcuw,). 



226 ANCIENT ART 

life — of a relative equilibrium. He has a strong feeling 
for what is just, but what is beautiful and what is true 
is to the same degree the object of his passion. He 
finds in each of these ideas the echoes of the other two, 
and completes, temjpers, and broadens each one through 
the others. Phidias is in Pythagoras, and Socrates 
is in Phidias. 

The Jews were bound to misunderstand Christ 
because he reacted as an artist against the ideal of 
justice which had made them unjust, and taught the 
lowly to pity the strong. The Greeks were far better 
prepared to understand Him. They knew Him from 
long ago. He was Dionysus, come from India and 
returning through Asia with the armies of Alexander; 
Dionysus the god of periodic resurrections, the god 
of primitive superstitions, of magics and sorceries, as 
he had been, in the time of iEschylus, the god of pagan 
drunkenness; Dionysus, the eternal god of the multi- 
tudes and of women. He was the God-man of their 
myths also, the hero, Herakles, Prometheus. Before 
Christ the Stoics had taught the conquest of the inner 
freedom, which is the measure of the discipline which 
we can impose on ourselves. Before Christ Socrates 
had died for man. The humanity of Christ was the 
testament of the ancient world rather than the preface 
to the new. 

First it brought the sword. St. Paul was to betray 
Jesus and whisper into the darkened intelFgence of 
the moaning world the revenge of the Jewish mind. 
The philosophers were to turn their backs on Him, 
but the suffering slaves and the women, of whom our 



Gbeco-Eotptian Art. Portrait of young girl, on papyrus 
(Archœoloffieal Museum, Florence). 



228 ANCIENT ART 

mind as well as our flesh is born, the women forever 
watching that the fire may burn on the hearth — the 
slaves and the women hearken to Him. Man creates 
the ideal, but he tires of it. When the ideal burnS 
out in him it is woman who picks it up to let it sleep 
in her until another male voice comes to awaken it 
there. If art is feminized and softened in the mind 
of men, as all the works of this age testify, the will 
becomes virile and tense in the heart of women. And 
it is the latter development which kills the former. 

Reason was dying alone, skeptical and disdainful. 
Sentiment was growing up alone, blind and groping. 
It was to conquer. It was the crowd and it was life. 

The sentimental uprising of the weak ruins civiliza- 
tion. We are about to burn the books, smash the 
statues, gut the human temples, and lose our contact 
with the earth. What does it matter? We must 
accept these downfalls. It is they that are the con- 
dition of the morrow which makes reparation. On 
the western soil, plowed by Greece, the real thought 
of Christ is to be reborn in the speech of Prometheus, 
after more than a thousand years of darkness, furies, 
and misunderstanding. Perhaps it is this abyss that 
is contemplated by the old portraits of the last Egypt, 
with their faces of enigma and their shadowy eyes in 
which a light trembles. 



I 



Chapter Vn. INTIMATE GREECE 



E official art, the great decorative 
I religious art, was losing sight of its 
Isprings, intimate art remained near 
m and continued to drink from them, 
iufi hero, who came up from the people, 
has disappeared, but the people is still there, and in it 
the Greek soul survives. The people undergoes the 
corrosive influence of intellectualism and of gold more 
slowly, and the flame of life smolders in it even when 
it is entirely extinguished on the upper levels. Even 
at the times of the worst decay the instinct of the 
multitudes contains all the elements of the higher life; 
only the awakening of new desires through the appear- 
ance of new needs is required to call forth the great 



230 ANCIENT ART 

man and to rîpen în hîm that înstinct whîch the dead 
mass of his ancestors and the living mass of mankind 
have intrusted to him. Brutal animal power and the 
power of the intelligence are our only weapons for the 
conquest of our organization. The average civilized 
man, however, is .as far from spiritual order as he is 
from direct possession. He has not yet attained the 
former; he has lost the latter. We are in the desert. 

It is the people throughout the whole extent of the 
Greek world who gather up the scattered elements of 
the soul of antiquity. The workman of art takes the 
place of the hero. The uprooted tree is to cover the 
earth with leaves. From the pavement of the Greek 
cities emerges a world of trinkets, figurines of metal 
and of terra cotta, jewels, engraved stones, furniture, 
coins, and painted or incised vases. Yesterday the 
man of genius was at the service of the people. To-day 
the man of the people is at the service of the man of 
means. 

The bond that unites the great artist with the artisan, 
the passage from the great sculpture to popular art, 
is the industry of . terra-cotta figurines which were 
manufactured by thousands at Tanagra, among those 
Boeotian peoples whom the Athenians so greatly 
despised. The industry is not new. It had existed 
since Archaic times. But in the fourth century, 
influenced by the diffusion of taste, it was to j>erfect 
and extend itself. Like a little timid reflection it 
follows the evolution of the great focus. Archaic, 
when the latter is so, it becomes powerful and luminous 
with the focus; in the Praxitelean period the figurine 



INTIMATE GREECE 231 

is frankly intimate. But before Praxiteles, the reflec- 
tion is totally lost in the blaze of the focus. From 
Praxiteles onward, when the focus is growing pale, the 



Fragment of aU-le (end of vi Century). 
(Pripote CoUection.) 

little reflection, on the contrary, becomes a shining 
point of light in the gathering shadow. The great 
sculpture which was made to decorate the temples 
and to live in space fails when it attempts to turn to 
to intimate things. The figurine, made to decorate 



282 ANCIENT ART 

private dwellings and to follow its owner to the tomb 
in order to win the gods over to him, is essentially 
intimate in inspiration and in destination. It was 
quite natural that it should at- 
tain its apogee in the eentury 
that brought the gods back 
among men. There are not 
many gods among the Ba<otian 
sepulchers. There are men, 
and, above all, women and 
children, and even animals, 
toys, and obscene figures. 

It has been said that Greek 
art lacked character. To assert 
this is to know it inadequately, 
and perhaps only by the calum- 
nies which the academies, the 
Roman copies, and the retro- 
spective novels have spread 
about it. \Miat is character? 
It is the placing in evidence 
not of the picturesque, but of 
the descriptive elements of a 
given form. The art of the fifth 

ANAGRA. centurj-, which has been said not 

Drapnl woman 
{imUMeque .\<Uumab-). t» ""^"^^ character, goes beyond 
individual character. It ex- 
presses the entire .species, it describes it by insisting 
upon the dominant character of every individual. But 
the intimate art of Greece does not aim so high. With 
its cliarming wisdom it follows individual character. 



INTIMATE GREECE 233 

People have foi^otten the Greek portraits — so rare, 
it is true, but so penetrating — they have forgotten the 
Tanagras, the Myrinas, the vase paintings, the whole 
of Pompeiian painting, and those statuettes, those 



Tanaora. The toilet (PrieaU Collection). 

studies which perpetuate the cruel satire on the life 
of the sick, the hunchbacked, the lame, and the infirm 
of all kinds. They forget that there are even carica- 
tures in the sepulchers of Tanagra. The popularity 
which the comedies of Aristophanes enjoyed is explained 
when we know their spectators. There was plenty 
of laughter in Greece, the philosophers laughed at the 



234 ANCIENT ART 

gods, the people laughed at the philosophers. The 
coroplasts (figure makers) of Tanagra and the potters 
of Ceramica were wholly joyous. 



Pitcher INational Museum, Athen*). 

Did they imitate the great contemporary statues 
as often as has been said? It is improbable. There 
were occasional reminiscences, at the most. Imita- 
tion, close or loose, is death. Now these things live. 
All the qualities of Fraxitelean sculpture are in them, 



INTIMATE GREECE 235 

and more acutely. They are modern. They will 
always be modern. It is because they are eternal. 
To make a living piece is to make something of eternity, 
to surprise the laws of life in their permanent dynamism. 



Magna Gracia. Girh pl&ying with osselets, terra cotta 
(British Miueum). 



Walking, dances, and games; the toilet, repose, gossip, 
attention, revery, immobility; the fine shadings of life, 
its impressions, and its memories — pass into these charm- 
ing things, or flee, or hesitate, or halt. They are a 
living crowd of unseizable moments, these candid little 
creatures, with their red hair and their tinted dresses. 
They are the flowers that Greece gathers for a crown 



236 ANCIENT ART 

as she looks at herself in the water, runs under the 
willows, stands on tiptoe to reach the lips of the gods, 
and lives an animal life so ingenuous that her singers 
and her sculptors could not help deifying it and suc- 
ceeding — as they followed its direction, without revolt 
and without a too laborious efifort — in illumining its 
spirit. 

These gracious creatures did not know their power 
of fascination. Greece loved and let herself be loved 
in an admirable innocence. If the grandiose sensualism 
of the Orient created the musical drama and inundated 
the sculptpr of Olympia with its sacred frenzy, it did 
no more than graze the masses of the people and the 
artist-workmen who interpreted their needs. It is 
this that always separated Dorian and even Attic art, 
at least, in their average manifestations, from the art 
of the Greeks of the Orient. The women of Myrina, 
the Tanagra of Asia Minor, knew their power of love. 
The true soul of Asiatic Greece, ardent to the point 
of voluptuousness, the soul whose flame streams into 
the Hellenic intelligence, is in the art of Myrina, far 
more than in the decorative sculpture of the time. 
The richness of language is less disturbing in it than 
in the hands of the artist of Pergamos, for tkis little 
art — colorful, ardent, and impulsive — is made to be 
seen close by. There is not the least emphasis in 
this art; it is rich, almost brutal, a thing made to 
communicate the ardor of these beautiful, alluring 
women with their plump backs, their round arms, 
their heavy hair, their trailing dresses. They paint 
their questionable faces and adorn themselves and load 



INTIMATE GREECE 237 

themselves with jewels. One thinks of Hindoo sculp- 
ture which is soon to be stirring in the shadow of the 
caverns, of the idols of 
Byzantium with the gems 
glittering around them; 
one thinks of the splen- 
did death, in the purple 
of Venice, of Oriental 
paganism. The conquest 
of the Occident by the 
woman of Asia is on the 
point of completion. 



Everywhere, between 
the fourth and the first 
century — in Italy, in 
Sicily, on the shores of 
Asia Minor — the popular 
and intimate art causes 
ofiicial art to recede. 
The coroplast of Myrina 
and of Tanagra, and the 
sculptor of Alexandria 
remains himself, whereas 
the decorator of the 
monuments tries to catch 



Tanaora (rv Century). 

(Mtueum of Chantilly.) 
once more a soul that has 

gone from him— that has gone out of the world — and 
to reconcentrate, by artificial means, the dissociated 



238 ANCIENT ART 

elements of artistic creation. At Alexandria the 
figurine sculptor was doubtless not a workman, as 
at Myrina or at Tanagra, but rather one of those 
very brilliant, very superficial, and very skillful, 
fashionable artists who swarm around the rich man. 
Every new social expression, it is true, calls forth 
an art which adapts itself to it, which is beautiful^ 
simply because of that fact. But plutocratic societies'^ 
constitute only a moment of that expression, the last 
before the downfall. It has been said that luxury 
called forth the arts. We may agree. But luxury 
consumes art, the profound creative feeling that comes 
out of the people in their full efforts, as the child from 
the mother's womb, the feeling that has in it their will, 
their hope, their power of illuminating. Between the 
statuette of the collector and the temples of a democ- 
racy there is the distance from the shelves of the 
drawing-room to the Acropolis. 

During the Alexandrian period and even more 
during the imperial period, the diffusion of taste 
crowded out creative force. When this force mani- 
fests itself it often passes for an insult to taste or, at 
least, to the practical and moderate idea which the 
ruling classes and the world of fashion conceive of the 
mystic function of the artist; they imagine him made 
to satisfy their needs. To be sure, the taste of Alex- 
andria is delightful — at least, the taste of the intel- 
lectual aristocracy; for the parvenu, there, as in other 
places, cares only for anecdotal art. Alexandria loves 
a whispering, tremulous, suave note in its production. 
Delicate little bronzes are created in which the material 



Tanaora. (iv Centiirj-). {Pritatc Collection.) 



240 ANCIENT ART 

takes on qualities of living flesh, of warm skin; it 
seems to cower from the cold like the \Trgin bodies so 
obligingly described by the sensual artist, in effete 
ei>ochs, for the delight of the eye and the hand of the 
cultivated collector. Woman no longer unveils her- 
self, the robes are stripped from her. Aphrodite no 
longer emerges from the sea; she enters the bathtub. 
She tries the water with her toes, her young body 
stoops or turns or stretches itself with a perfect absence 
of shame, and yet remains chaste, if one thinks of 
Asia, which attempts a last violent effort. Doubtless 
also, there is a debt to Egj-ptian purity, which Grecian 
nobility recognizes and weds. 

Here is the fashionable drawing-room, here are rare 
pieces of furniture and the glass cases in which sleep 
precious things, sheltered from profaning hands. 
Polygraphy and romance have succeeded tragedy and 
history. It is the period when persons of el^ance, 
men or women, covered from head to foot with amu- 
lets and jewels, eat and drink from chiseled metal. 
The locust, wrought of gold and worn in the hair, no 
longer sufficed for ladies of fashion. They needed 
rings, cameos, intaglios, necklaces, bracelets, clasps, 
and eardrops. The jewels of gold were, in Greece at 
least, of simple form, for Asia and imperial Rome have 
more pompous taste. The metal has the suppleness 
of a trailing vine, it creeps like a reptile over the forms, 
it ,weds the warm creases of the neck, it encircles the 
splendor of the arms, it draws the eye to the beautiful 
hands, it marries the dull sheen of the painted skin 
to its own tawny pallor. Set in a bezel or susp>ended, 



INTIMATE GREECE 241 

finely engraved stones bear images of the gods and 
portraits, birds, lions, beetles, and chimeras; there 
are as many amulets as there are superstitions in the 
epochs without faith. 



Sicilian coins (Biblùilheque Naiionale). 

The cult of the stone for its own sake, for its arrest- 
ing of light, was unknown to ancient art. The material 
must be wrought, must have imprinted in it man's 
idea of the universe, of himself, and of his destiny. 
In stone, in marble, bronze, gold, silver, ivory, wax, 
wood, and clay, in all the crystallizations of the earth, 
its bones, its flesh, its' blood and its tears, the Greek 
of every land carved the form of his spirit. Some 
men have doubted the beauty of the chryselephantine 
sculpture of the fifth century as they have doubted 
the splendor which the temples of blue and gold must 
have taken on as they arose, under the immense Greek 
sky, from the forests and laurels of the acropolises and 



240 ANCIENT ART 

takes on qualities of living flesh, of warm skin; it 
seems to cower from the cold like the virgin bodies so 
obligingly described by the sensual artist, in effete 
epochs, for the delight of the eye and the hand of the 
cultivated collector. Woman no longer unveils her- 
self, the robes are stripped from her. Aphrodite no 
longer emerges from the sea; she enters the bathtub. 
She tries the water with her toes, her young body 
stoops or turns or stretches itself with a perfect absence 
of shame, and yet remains chaste, if one thinks of 
Asia, which attempts a last violent effort. Doubtless 
also, there is a debt to Egj^ptian purity, which Grecian 
nobihty recognizes and weds. 

Here is the fashionable drawing-room, here are rare 
pieces of furniture and the glass cases in which sleep 
precious things, sheltered from profaning hands. 
Polygraphy and romance have succeeded tragedy and 
history. It is the period when persons of elegance, 
men or women, covered from head to foot with amu- 
lets and jewels, eat and drink from chiseled metal. 
The locust, wrought of gold and worn in the hair, no 
longer suflSced for ladies of fashion. They needed 
rings, cameos, intaglios, necklaces, bracelets, clasps, 
and eardrops. The jewels of gold were, in Greece at 
least, of simple form, for Asia and imperial Rome have 
more pompous taste. The metal has the suppleness 
of a trailing vine, it creeps like a reptile over the forms, 
it ,weds the warm creases of the neck, it encircles the 
splendor of the arms, it draws the eye to the beautiful 
hands, it marries the dull sheen of the painted skin 
to its own tawny pallor. Set in a bezel or sus]>ended, 



INTIMATE GREECE «41 

finely engraved stones bear images of the gods and 
portraits, birds, lions, beetles, and chimeras; there 
are as many amulets as there are superstitions in the 
epochs without faith. 



Sicilian coins (Bibliothèque Nationale). 

The cult of the stone for its own sake, for its arrest- 
ing of light, was unknown to ancient art. The material 
must be wrought, must have imprinted in it man's 
idea of the universe, of himself, and of his destiny. 
In stone, in marble, bronze, gold, silver, ivory, wax, 
wood, and clay, in all the crystallizations of the earth, 
its bones, its Besh, its' blood and its tears, the Greek 
of every land carved the form of his spirit. Some 
men have doubted the beauty of the chryselephantine 
sculpture of the fifth centurj' as they have doubted 
the splendor which the temples of blue and gold must 
have taken on as they arose, under the immense Greek 
sky, from tlie forests and laurels of the acropolises and 



240 ANCIENT ART 

takes on qualities of living flesh, of warm skin; it 
seems to cower from the cold like the virgin bodies so 
obligingly described by the sensual artist, in effete 
epochs, for the delight of the eye and the hand of the 
cultivated collector. Woman no longer unveils her- 
self, the robes are stripped from her. Aphrodite no 
longer emerges from the sea; she enters the bathtub. 
She tries the water with her toes, her young body 
stoops or turns or stretches itself with a perfect absence 
of shame, and yet remains chaste, if one thinks of 
Asia, which attempts a last violent effort. Doubtless 
also, there is a debt to Egj-ptian purity, which Grecian 
nobiUty recognizes and weds. 

Here is the fashionable drawing-room, here are rare 
pieces of furniture and the glass cases in which sleep 
precious things, sheltered from profaning hands. 
Polygraphy and romance have succeeded tragedy and 
history. It is the period when persons of elegance, 
men or women, covered from head to foot with amu- 
lets and jewels, eat and drink from chiseled metal. 
The locust, wrought of gold and worn in the hair, no 
longer suflSced for ladies of fashion. They needed 
rings, cameos, intaglios, necklaces, bracelets, clasps, 
and eardrops. The jewels of gold were, in Greece at 
least, of simple form, for Asia and imperial Rome have 
more pompous taste. The metal has the suppleness 
of a trailing vine, it creeps hke a reptile over the forms, 
it ;sveds the warm creases of the neck, it encircles the 
splendor of the arms, it draws the eye to the beautiful 
hands, it marries the dull sheen of the painted skin 
to its own tawny pallor. Set in a bezel or suspended, 



INTIMATE GREECE 241 

finely engraved stones bear images of the gods and 
portraits, birds, lions, beetles, and chimeras; there 
are as many amulets as there are superstitions in the 
epochs without faith. 



Sicilian coins {BibUntkeqve Nationak). 

The cult of the stone for its own sake, for its arrest- 
ing of tight, was unknown to ancient art. The material 
must be wrought, must have imprinted in it man's 
idea of the universe, of himself, and of his destiny. 
In stone, in marble, bronze, gold, silver, ivory, wax, 
wood, and clay, in all the crj'stallizations of the earth, 
its bones, its flesh, its' blood and its tears, the Greek 
of every land carved the form of his spirit. Some 
men have doubted the beauty of the chryselephantine 
sculpture of the fifth century as they have doubted 
the splendor which the temples of blue and gold must 
have taken on as they arose, under the immense Greek 
sky, from the forests and laurels of the acropolises and 



240 ANCIENT ART 

takes on qualities of living flesh, of warm skin; it 
seems to cower from the cold like the virgin bodies so 
obligingly described by the sensual artist, in effete 
epochs, for the delight of the eye and the hand of the 
cultivated collector. Woman no longer unveils her- 
self, the robes are stripped from her. Aphrodite no 
longer emerges from the sea; she enters the bathtub. 
She tries the water with her toes, her young body 
stoops or turns or stretches itself with a perfect absence 
of shame, and yet remains chaste, if one thinks of 
Asia, which attempts a last violent effort. Doubtless 
also, there is a debt to Egyptian purity, which Grecian 
nobility recognizes and weds. 

Here is the fashionable drawing-room, here are rare 
pieces of fiu^niture and the glass cases in which sleep 
precious things, sheltered from profaning hands. 
Polygraphy and romance have succeeded tragedy and 
history. It is the period when persons of elegance, 
men or women, covered from head to foot with amu- 
lets and jewels, eat and drink from chiseled metal. 
The locust, wrought of gold and worn in the hair, no 
longer sufficed for ladies of fashion. They needed 
rings, cameos, intaglios, necklaces, bracelets, clasps, 
and eardrops. The jewels of gold were, in Greece at 
least, of simple form, for Asia and imperial Rome have 
more pompous taste. The metal has the suppleness 
of a trailing vine, it creeps like a reptile over the forms, 
it ;weds the warm creases of the neck, it encircles the 
splendor of the arms, it draws the eye to the beautiful 
hands, it marries the dull sheen of the painted skin 
to its own tawny pallor. Set in a bezel or suspended, 



INTIMATE GREECE 241 

finely engraved stones bear images of the gods and 
portrait», birds, lions, beetles, and chimeras; there 
are as many amulets as there are superstitions in the 
epochs without faith. 



Sicilian coins (Biblwiheque NaiwnaU). 

The cult of the stone for its own sake, for its arrest- 
ing of tight, was unknown to ancient art. The material 
must be wrought, must have imprinted in it man's 
idea of the universe, of himself, and of his destiny. 
In stone, in marble, bronze, gold, silver, ivory, wax, 
wood, and clay, in all the crj'stallizations of the earth, 
its bones, its flesh, its* blood and its tears, the Greek 
of every land carved the form of his spirit. Some 
men have doubted the beauty of the chryselephantine 
sculptiire of the fifth centurj- as they have doubted 
the splendor whicli the temples of blue and gold must 
have taken on as they arose, under the immense Greek 
sky, from the forests and laurels of the acropolises and 



242 ANCIENT ART 

the promontories, giving to the white marble an inde- 
scribable quality of obsolute spirituality. When they 
carved Athena and Zeus in ivory or gold, the Greeks 
wanted only to express their veneration for them. 
But a mind like that of Phidias could not be mistaken 
in the medium. Behind his brow reigned order, lyric 
force, and the harmonious accord between intelligence 
and the heart, and if he carved gods in gold and ivory 
it was because gold and ivory obeyed him as marble 
did. What difference does the material make.'* WTiat- 
ever if is, it expresses the artist as, in the crust of the 
earth, coal, and the diamond mingle and express its 
subterranean fire. The material is poured boiling 
into the mold of his soul; when his soul is strong, clay 
is strong as bronze, and when his soul is gentle, bronze 
is as tender as clay. 

What good stuff the world is made of! Like the 
skin and the wool of the beasts, like the meat of the 
fruits, like bread, this stuff is man's companion. It 
is the water and the salt. It has the docility of the 
domestic creatures, it welcomes the master at his 
threshold and at his doorstep, protects him in the 
walls and the roofs, offers itself for his repose, hollows 
itself to receive his food, reaches up to lift its fruits 
to his lips and strives ingeniously to yield him mate- 
rials less hard than itself. There was a time, toward 
the end of Hellenism, when wrought material siu*- 
rounded man on every hand, like a motionless proces- 
sion, at once defending and exalting him. Heroic art 
was weakening, doubtless, but the gods of ivory and 
gold were intact, deep in the sanctuaries, and the 



INTIMATE GREECE 243 

bright-painted marble heroes still inhabited the metopes 
where the gold of their bucklers glistened. Painted 
temples were everywhere, and propylïea, porticos, 
stadiums built of steps, colonnades, and terminal gods. 
The pavements of the streets were of marble, as were 



Tanaora (rv Century). [Privaie Collection.) 

the steps of the acropolises and the serene amphi- 
theaters looking over the hills to the sea. Gold and 
stone, jasper, agates, amethyst, cornelian, chalcedony, 
and rock-crystal went into the jewels which weighed 
on the arras, clasped the tunics, and shone in the dyed 
hair. And in the houses of marble, stone, or wood, 
and even in the depths of the sepulchers, were seats of 
marble or of wood, vases of gold, of silver, of bronze, 
statuettes of terra cotta or of metal, pots of clay or 
cups of onyx. 



244 ANCIENT ART 

The hollow of the hand lent its warmth to precious 
bits of material, the piece of gold, silver, or copper. 
Greece did not invent the coin, it is true, but its cities 
were the first to give it its circular form, to place a 
head on one side, a symbol on the other, and an inscrip- 
tion composed of watchwords, signatures, or the value. 
With the diffusion of wealth and «esthetic culture, the 
coin springs from the bronze matrices in swarms. It 
is made practically everywhere, in Athens, Asia, 
Alexandria, and in Sicily especially, in the workshops 
of Syracuse. Coins mount from the Hellenic hearth 
like a shower of sparks. The type changes with the 
city, the events, the victories, and the traditions. 
Statues, celebrated pictiu^es, legends, myths, symbolic 
animals, and incisive portraits, the reliefs polished by 
millions of hands and shaded with black in the hollows 
have the look of a living material made motionless by 
the mint. The circle is never a perfect one, the thick- 
ness of the disk varies; there, as in other cases, the 
equilibrium of the elements makes of the art object a 
complete organism, which symmetry would kill. The 
metal seems forced out from within as if swelling with 
juice and with a soul. The Greeks give to it a life 
of flesh or of the plant. On silver or gold vases they 
carve networks of twining branches, among which 
seeds, buds, and leaves — of the oak, the olive tree, the 
laurel, the plane tree or ivy — seem to tremble. Heavy 
fruit buries itself in the mystery of the foliage. 

It is perhaps by these vases and by many of the 
terra cotta figurines that we can best judge to what 
degree the Greeks understood the frame in which the 



INTIMATE GREECE 245 

human fij;ure moves. The setting was not a dominant 
idea with them as it was later on with the Hindoos 
and the men of the Renaissance — especially the Flem- 
ings and the Frenchmen of the Renaissance — because 
the soil of Greece was less rich in animate forms and 
because the Greeks looked on man as the ripe fruit; it 



MvRiNA. Statuettes, terra cotta {Louvre). 

was the fruit that constantly attracted them, whereas 
the branches, the trunk, and the ground in which the 
tree grew seemed to them only accompaniments to the 
superior melody realized by the mind. But their 
great tragic poets saw the msenads, dressed in tiger 
skins and girdled with serpents, crowned with flowers 
and leafy vine branches, bounding out of the forests 
with the panthers; they spoke of those monstrous 
imions from which the beast-man came, to affirm the 



246 ANCIENT ART 

grand accord of indifferent nature and the mind guided 
by will. And the humblest of their peasants, who 
knew that the spring and the grotto were peopled with 
familiar divinities, was at peace as he felt the fraternity 
of his soil. 

in 

The Greeks introduced into their house the world 
of the air and the plants. The cadaver of Pompeii, 
a city of Magna Gniecia, built and decorated by Greeks, 
is covered with flowers. In the inner rooms, in the 
markets, everywhere are garlands of flowers, fruits, 
and leaves; there are birds and fishes, dense, shining, 
fiery still-life pieces surrounding false windows and 
painted floors which open on perspectives of streets 
and squares, of architecture and streets. It is doubt- 
less only ,a translated. Latinized Greece, different from 
classic Greece and much affected by influences of 
Alexandria, of Asia, and inspired above all by the sea- 
sky, the vegetation, the red rocks, the flame, and the 
wine mulled on hot coals. Theocritus was a Syra- 
cusan, it is true. But on the soil of Greece there 
are bas-reliefs, vase-sculptures, Tanagra group>s — 
satyrs, nymphs, young women, dancers, divinities of 
the woods and torrents — around whom we hear the 
purling of water, the rustle of leaves, the lowing and 
sharp bleating of the beasts, and flutes laughing and 
crying in the wind. And if surrounding nature stilled 
her voices for a moment to let Phidias commune with 
himself as he wrote into the human form alone his 
understanding of the world, Sophocles went to sit in 



INTIMATE GREECE 247 

the grove of Colonna, the grove of orange trees with 
its many crickets where the brooks ripple under the 
moss; Pindar, the rugged poet of the north, while 
journeying to the games by routes which took him to 
gorges and beaches, picked up on his way some for- 
midable images, full of the sky 
and the ocean; ^Eschylus, from 
the top of the Acropolis of Argos, 
watchetl the night sparkle, and 
from the most distant past of 
Hellas a cool breeze was blown. 
-Egean art is already alive with 
forms of the sea. The sea wind, 
the water of the river, and the 
murmur of the foliage are wit- 
nesses to the meeting of Ulysses 
and Nausicaa, whom the hero 
compares to the stem of a palm 
tree. Does not Vitruvius affirm 
that the Doric comes from the 
male torso, the Ionic from the 

female torso? 

- . , • . , Syrian statuette 

In anv case, this rather /c _ r ». > 

(From Le Musée). 

limited Pompeiian art, made 

up, as it is, of recollections and distaat imitations, 
and due almost entirely to the brush of hired decora- 
tors and of house painters, breathes the animal and 
the material world, the swarming and confused world 
that surrounds us. How young it still is, despite the 
old age of the pagan civilizations; how vigorous it is 
with all its vague mossiness; how profound and full 



248 ANCIENT ART 

of the antique soul! What persuasion there is in its 
power, and, on the monochrome backgrounds — red, 
black, green, or blue — how broad and spontaneous the 
stroke is, how sure, how intense in expression, and how 
living the form! Amors, dancers, winged geniuses, 
gods or goddesses, animals, forms nude, draped, or 
aureoled with wavy gauzes, legends, battles, and all 
the ancient symbolism so near the soil live again here, 
with a slightly gross sensualism and with the candor 
of the workmen who interpret, certainly, but with that 
calm, that almost unspoiled freshness, that virginity 
of life which were known only to the ancient world. 
The dancing forms appear half veiled, with their pure 
arms and pure legs continuing the pure torSo, like 
balanced branches. The nude bodies emerge gently 
from the shadow, floating in their firm equilibrium. 
Here and there are implacable portraits with large, 
ardent eyes — with life in its brutal austerity, undi- 
minished by any visible intermediary. At times, 
side by side with the Greek soul, and bearing a germ 
of academism that, fortunately, is still unconscious, 
there is that ardent expressiveness which, thirteen 
centuries later, was to characterize the awakening of 
Italy. It is to be seen in that "Theseus Victorious 
over the Minotaur," which the great Masaccio would 
have loved. It is an anxious, uneven world, with 
currents of influence running through it in every direc- 
tion, but fiery and brilliant, rotten at the top, and yet 
ingenuous underneath. 

See in these portraits the sense of immensity that 
is in the gaze, how the great figures are steeped in 



INTIMATE GREECE 249 

thought, and how a tremor seems to run inward through 
their living immobility. This arrested life is almost 
terrible to look upon. One would say that it had 



Hellenistic Abt, Aphrodite, bronze statuette 
(BrUiah Muieunt). 

been suddenly fixed, as if seized by the volcano at the 
same hour a^ the city wa^. Impressionism, do you 
say? Yes, in its fire, in its breadth, in the way in 
which the movement is instantaneously surprised; 
but however much weakened, however enervated the 



250 ANCIENT ART 

voice of tne artisans of a corrupt and skeptical age, 
this painting expresses a power of comprehension and 
a depth of love that only a few isolated men attain 
to-day. It is the only real renascence of Greek hero- 
ism. It responds, like the "Hercules of the Belvedere" 
and the Venuses of the valley of the Rhone, to the 
shock of Hellenic intelligence as it meets with Latin 
force and, in a flash, creates an art complete in its 
vigor, its ardent life, and its feverish concentration. 

Although these paintings are not, properly speaking, 
copies (if we admit that a copy is possible and that 
the copyist, whether mediocre or touched with genius, 
does not in every case substitute his nature for that 
of the master), although they are only reminiscences, 
the transplantation of Greek works on a renewed soil, 
it is through them that we* can get an idea — even if a 
distant one — of the painting of antiquity, which the 
crumbling of the temples has wiped out. The most 
celebrated frescoes of the dead city recalled the works 
of Polygnotus, Zeuxis, Parrhasios, and Apelles. The 
painting related the ancient myths and the story of 
the national wars. At first it knew flat colors only, "^ 
very much simplified, doubtless, very brilliant and 
hard tones, brutal in their oppositions, before modeling 
appeared with Parrhasios. The lines which inclosed 
the powerful polychromy must have had the firmness 
of the uninterrupted curve which the passage of the 
hills to the plains and of bays to the sea taught to the 
men who were at this time making the gods. Always 
decorative in its beginnings, it undergoes the fate of 
the painting of modern schools, where the easel picture 



INTIMATE GREECE 251 

appears when the statues descend from their heights 
on the temples to invade the public squares, apart- 
ments, and gardens. Like sculpture, this painting 
had to bi;nd to the will of the rich man. But doubt- 



Urœiis, bronze (.Bibliothèque NationaU). 

less it retained its character better, being more supple, 
more a thing of shades, more individualistic, more 
the master of saying only what it did not want to hide. 
I see it, after Parrhasios, as somewhat like Venetian 
painting around Giorgione and Titian :' ripe, warm, 



252 ANCIENT ART 

autumnal, with an evanescent modeling in the colorful 
shadows and dazzling in the parts which stand out 
and which seem turned to gold by the sap from within. 
It is less fluid and musical, however — more massfve, 
more compact. Oil painting has not been discovered, 
and the wax renders the work slower and less immaterial. 

IV 

In any case it has preserved until our time, through 
Pompeii, the perfume of the Greek soul, of which it 
hands on to us one of the most mysterious aspects, far 
better than does the art of ceramics, which has traced 
that soul for us in hardly anything more than its 
external evolution — in such matters as composition, 
superficial technique, and subjects. The role of 
ceramics is limited, with the little terra cottas, to rep- 
resenting the national industrial art of Greece — which 
is already saying a good deal. But it cannot pretend 
to stand for more than the reflection in the popular 
soul of the flowers gathered by certain minds throughout 
the nation. 

Hundreds of workshops had been opened practically 
everywhere, in Athens, in Sicily, in Etruria, in Cyre- 
naica, in the Islands, in the Euxine, in a place as dis- 
tant, even, as the Crimea. The most celebrated 
painters of cups, Euplironius, Brygos, and Douris, 
worked with their workmen, often repeated them- 
selves, copied one another and rivaled one another 
in activity so as to attract patrons. Through the 
goodly communion of their work, through their con- 
tinual exchange and emulation, they founded a pow- 



I'oMPEii (i Century A.D.). Telephiis suckled by a doe, fresco 
(Naples Muieum). 



254 ANCIENT ART 

erful industry. In it, as in other activities, except 
where Greece was dominated by Sparta, the slave 
collaborated with the master, whether as a farmer in 
the country, as a servant in the city or as an artisan 
in the workshop; he was, beyond all doubt, less 
unhappy than the feudal serfs or the wage-earner of 
to-day. Man was too wise, at that time, to utilize 
the sufferings of man for his profit; life was too simple, 
too near the soil, too merged with the light to take 
the law of hell as its model. 

Industrial art, however, in spite of these powerful 
roots, is so limited by its very purposes, that it cannot 
pretend to such high intention as that of the art which 
governs the sculpture of the gods. On the other 
hand, it avoids, for a much longer time, the double 
snare of pretentiousness and of fashion. Thus it dies 
less quickly and renews itself more readily. Diderot 
was right in re-establishing the dignity of the industrial 
arts. He was wrong in placing them on the same 
level with the others. The sculptor, and more espec- 
ially the painter, in his struggle with the material, is 
guided only by the quality of the material. The 
purpose of the object allows it, to move in so wide an 
area that the liberty of these artists knows no other 
limits than those of the infinite space in which occur 
the relationships of intelligence and sensibility with 
the whole universe of sensations and images. The 
artisan is confined between narrower frontiers by the 
function of the furniture or the ornament on which 
he works, and also by its size. A fresco and a thimble 
do not offer identical means to their creators. If the 



INTIMATE GREECE, 255 

murmur of the soul can be as pure, as touching, in one 
as io the other, the elements of the symphony are far 
less numerous in the latter case, and infinitely less 



Pompeii (i Century A.D.). Theseus, conqueror of the 
Minotaur, fresco {Naples Mugeum). 

complex. And, before practical utility, spiritual utility 
is obliged to retreat. 

In addition, the workman must arrange, in such a 
way, the ornaments with which he wants to decorate 
the object, so that they will follow the contour of its 



256 ANCIENT ART 

forma, to modify themselves according to its volume 
and its surfaces, and, like himself, accept a ro!e which 
excludes all others and which is, even so, of an inferior 



Herculaneum. Faun playing on pipes, fresco 

(Naples Museum). 

order. And thus it is that only in very rare cases do 
we discover on the sides of even the most beautiful 
Athenian vases a hint of that logical composition 
which places the great sculpture on the plane of the 
universal. Forms elongate and become parallel to 
wed the flanks of the amphoras. to make them straight 
and to give them spring. They stretch in encircling 



INTIMATE GREECE 257 

rings around the cups, the vases, and the bowls as if 
to drag the pot along in a spinning movement. Here 
and there, undoubtedly very often, in an ensemble at 
once fiery and sober, easily read at a glance, black on 
red or red on black, there are admirable details, draw- 



Canthanis of EpJgenes {Louvre). 

ing as pure as the line of the landscape, incisive as the 
mind of the race, and suggesting the absent modeling 
by its direction alone and its manner of indicating 
attitude and movement. For the workman as for 
the sculptor of the temple, the moid of the Archaic 
is broken, nature is no longer a world of immutable 
and separate forms, but a moving world, constantly 
combining and disuniting itself, renewing its aspects 
and changing the elements of its relationships at every 
second. 

The form of these vases is so pure that one would 



258 ANCIENT ART 

say it had been born unaided, that it had not come 
from the hands of the potters, but from the obscure 
and permanent play of the forces of nature. We have 
a vague sensation before these vases, as if the artist 



Votive helmet, bronze (Louvre). 

were obeying the hints of the wheel as he presses in 
or swells out the clay, thickens the paste or spreads it. 
^Tien the wheel hums, when the material whirls and 
flies, an inner music nmrmurs to the moving form the 
mysterious fluctuation which gives songs and dances 



INTIMATE GREECE 259 

their rhythm. Grain, breasts, round haunches, closed 
flowers, open flowers, twining roots, spherical forms of 
nature — the central mystery of them all sleeps ia the 
still hollow of the vases. The law of universal attrac- 
tion does not control the suns alone, but all matter 
moves and turns in the same circle. Man tries to 
escape from the rhythm, and rhythm always draws 



Cup of Chelis [Louvre). 

him back again. The vase has the form of fruits, of 
the mother's belly, and of the plants. The sphere 
is the matrix and the tomb of forms. Everything 
comes out of it. Everything returns to it. 

Save in the case of the great Panathenaic amphoras 
which have the severity of design proper to their use, the 
Greek vase almost always welcomes you with a charming 
sense of the intimate. ^\Tien it recounts the adventures 
of war or interprets the old myths, it humanizes itself 
delightfully. Very often there are children at their 



260 ANCIENT AKT 

games, men in their workshop, women at their toilet, 
long, undulating, and rich forms indicated with a con- 
tinuous hne. The familiar painting of the Egj-ptian 
husbandman told of the work of the fields. The 
familiar painting of the Greeks, a people of traders 
and talkers, speaks rather of household work. 

The legend of the stern heroism of every-day exist- 
ence is no more born out by these vases than by the 



Magna Gb£CIA. Olive vase, silver. Treasury of Boscoreolc 

(Louvre). 

Bœotian figurines. Life in the ancient city tends 
toward a kindly, sometimes difficult, equilibrium. 
The passages between its component elements are 
more noticeable in speech and in the written law than 
in reality. Southern indulgence and familiarity draw 
everything together. If the Greek had looked down 
on woman he would not have spoken of her with so 
much intelligent love, and if he had been harsh toward 
his servitor he would not have shown him thus asso- 
ciated with his own tasks. The child plays and goes 
to school, where he learns music, writing, and récita- 



INTIMATE GREECE 261 

tioD. The ephebus frequents the stadium, the men, 
young and old, frequent the agoru, tlie housewife 
spins and sews. On feast days, the joung girls, like 
bending reeds, like undulating water, like waving flow- 
ers and garlands, dance 
in long lines, making 
rhythmical — to the sound 
of the shrill musie^the 
movements of the march, 
of the pursuit, of the fare- 
well, of supplication, of 
prayer, of a voluptuous- 
ness unconscious of itself 
— a full epitome of the 
essential moments of our 
life. Passion? The 
Greek knew it so well 
that he deified it, but it 
was for him a food, the 
passage from one state of 
equilibrium to another; F""™'.' ••*(' Century B.C.). 

(Aoifimof iluseum, Athens.) 
he had the intuitive feel- 
ing that the impulse of sentiment was only a means 
of realizing harmony. 

Ares and Aphrodite had their temples, Dionysus 
also, but outside of Eleusis- — a veiled summit, a mys- 
terious region where, doubtless, the unity of our 
desire was revealed^ — ^the three summits of Greece 
were the Parthenon of Athens, the sanctuarj' of Delphi, 
and the Altis of Olympia, where man came to adore 
Reason, Beauty, and Energy. Heroism is life accepted. 



262 ANCIENT ART 

It is the progressive and never-attained realization 
of the conquests that Hfe imposes on us. 

Submission to destiny — therein is Greece. There 
are in Athens, in the little cemetery of Ceramica at 
the foot of the Acropolis, certain funeral steles of a 
moving symbolism. Greece so wanted us to love life 
that she expressed her desire even on the stone of the 
tomb. Farewells are said there with simple gestures, 
with slightly sad and perfectly calm faces, as if the 
persons were going to see each other again. Friend 
clasps the hand of friend, the mother touches the 
child's hair with her fingers, the serving maid hands 
to the mistress her jewel casket. The familiar animals 
come, to be present at the departure. The glory of 
terrestial life enters the subterranean shadow. 



The Rouaj4 Campagna. 



Chapter VIII. ROME 



L the Hellenistic period the radiante 
jreece in the Mediterranean world 
rented men from perceiving the civil- 
ions which were growing up or dis- 
apircaring round about her. The nation 
she knew best and of which she spoke most favorably 
was Persia, because it was the power she had to com- 
bat. The old peoples had hardly more than one means 
of intermingling with and comprehending one another, 
which was war. Now, military conquest was repugnant 
to the Greeks. The colonies which they had sown 
on all the shores of Asia, the Euxine, North Africa, 
southern Italy, and Sicily constituted a network of 
stations in their vast maritime system which was 



264 ANCIENT ART 

pretty closely reserved for the nation, and b^ond 
which everything, for them, was legends, semidarkness, 
and confusion. Trade scarcely got beyond the coasts 
of the happy seas. The interior of the lands, the 
mountains of the horizon, the unknown forests, with- 



Etruscan Art (vi Century B.C.)- Sarcophagus, detail 
{Villa of Pope Julitu). 



held their secret from Greece, since they escaped her 
influence. 

Hellenism has left only furtive traces outside of the 
Greek world, properly so-called. There was, perhaps, 
only one agricultural and nonmaritime people that 
was stronglj- influenced by Greece, through the cities 
of Magna Grœcia and through the sea routes. The 
country that lies between the Arno, the Tiber, the 



ROME 265 

Apennines, and the sea was probably the only one of 
the old world to accept, without resistance, and from 
the heroic period onward, the supremacy of the Greek 
spirit. The Etruscans, like the Greeks, were doubtless 
descended from the old Pelasgians, and recognized in 
the products brought them by the ships — ^vases 
especially, which they bought in large quantities — 
the encouragement of an effort related to their own. 
In fact the most original manifestations of their art 
always owe something to Greece and, certainly by 
intermediation of the latter, to Assyria and to Egypt. 

In time, undoubtedly, if Rome had not come to 
crush the germ of Etruscan genius, the latter would 
have profited by the decline of Greece, for the reahza- 
tion of itself through contact with its soil. It is a 
rugged land of torrents, forests, and mountains, well 
drawn and well defined. But the Etruscan peasant, 
bent over his furrow, in his landscape where the eye 
is constantly arrested by the hills, did not have the 
free horizon that opened before the man of Greece 
trafficking among the bays and islands, or tending his 
sheep on the heights. Hence, there is in Etruscan 
art something funereal, violent, and bitter. 

The priest reigns. Forms are inclosed in tombs. 
In the sculpture of the sarcophagi we frequently find 
two strange figures leaning on their elbows with the 
stiffness and the mechanical expression known to ali 
archaisms — the lower part of their bodies unconnected 
with the secret and smiling upper part; the frescos 
of the funerary chambers tell a tale of sacrifices and 
kilUngs; the whole art is fanatical, superstitious, and 



266 ANCIENT ART 

agitated. The myth and the technique often come 
from the Greeks. But we seem to have something 
here which resembles more the hell which the Fisan 
primitives are to paint, twenty centuries later, on the 
walls of the Campo Santo, than it does the harmonies 



Etruscan Art. Tomb of the Augurs, fresco, detail 
{Conieto Tarquinia). 

of Zeuxis. Tuscan genius is already piercing through» 
underneath these bizarre, over-elongated, and some- 
what sickly forms, wherein the vigor and elegance of 
the race fail to overcome the enervated mysticism. 
None the less a strange force, a mysterious life wells 
up in them. These somber frescos look like the 
shadows which one might trace on a wall. An all- 
powerful decorative genius reveals itself in them, an 
equilibrium constantly pursued and given style to 



ROME 267 

by the visible symmetry of the ritual gestures, of the 
flight of birds, of the branches, the leaves, and the 
flowers. It seems a kind of dance, caught in the 
instant of its most fleeting rhythm. 

Etruria, as the educator of Rome, was the inter- 
mediary step of civilization on its march from the 



Etruscan Art. Cinerary um (Peruçia). 

East to the West. The material remains of the 
Roman Republic teach us, perhaps, more about the 
genius of the Etruscans than about that of the founders 
of the city. The vault, which the Felasgians brought 
from Asia, and which their i£gean descendants gave 
to primitive Greece, is transmitted to Rome by their 
Italic descendants in Italy. The Roman arch of 



268 ANCIENT ART 

triumph is only a modified Etruscan gate. Rome had 
the "Cloaca Maxima" built by architects from Etruria, 
and it forms the intestines of the city, the vital organ 
around which its profound materialism is to install 
itself, to grow little by little and extend its arms of 
stone over the whole of the ancient world. The 
Etruscan, from the sixth century onward, not only 
brings to Rome his religion and his science of augury, 
he digs the sewers, builds the temples, erects the first 
statues; he forges the arms by which Rome is to 
reduce, him to subjection. He casts bronze, and his 
bronzes, in which he reveals his genius for uncompro- 
mising expression, have a bitter force that is as rugged 
and hard as the oak clumps of the Apennines. The 
symbol of Rome, the rough she- wolf of * the Capitol, 
was made by an old Tuscan bronze worker. 



II 

From her beginnings Rome is herself. She diverts 
to her profit the moral sources of the old world as she 
diverts the waters of the mountains to bring tliem 
inside her walls. The source once captured, her 
avidity exhausts it, and she goes on farther to capture 
another. At the beginning of the third century 
Etruria has been crushed by Rome, and her blood 
and nerves have been mingled with those of the Latins 
and the Sabines. And this is the cement which holds 
together the block on which Rome is to support her- 
self, to spread over the world tlie concentric circles 
of her vital effort. All the resistance she encounters. 



Etruscan Art. Fresco {Carneto Targuinia), 



270 ANCIENT ART 

Pyrrhus, Carthage, and Hannibal, will be to her only 
so many instruments for cultivating her will and for 
increasing it. The legions progress like the regular 
deposit of a river. 

If Roman positivism had not pressed the Latin and 
Etruscan together, one asks, as one reads Plautus, 
Lucretius, Vergil, and Juvenal, what art could have 
realized this rough synthesis of the Italic peoples, 
with their love of woods and gardens, their genius, 
as bitter as the .leaves of their trees, and as rich as 
their plow-lands? But the Roman was bent too much 
on external conquests to conquer all his own vigor 
and harshness. As long as war continued methodically 
— five or six centuries — he had not the time to express 
himself. As soon as the springs relaxed, the mind of 
conquered Greece upset the whole mechanism. Mum- 
mius, after the sack of Corinth, said to the contractors 
charged with getting the spoil to Rome: "I warn you 
that if you break those statues you will have to make 
new ones to replace them." 

Such a misunderstanding of the higher role of the 
work of art has about it something sacred. A candor 
is revealed therein from which a people may expect 
everything, if it is also the characteristic of that 
people's viewing of life. For Rome it would have 
been salvation, if she had refused the masterpieces 
which the Consul sent to her. But she accepted them 
eagerly, she had others sent, and still others; she 
devastated Greece, and her hard spirit wore itself 
down on that diamond. 

We have, in this, one of the fatalities of history, and 



ROME 271 

the proof of the tendency in the ensemble of human 
societies to seek its equiUbrium. Subjected materially, 
a people of superior culture morally subjects the people 
that conquered it. Chaldea imposed its mind on 



Etruscan Abt. She-wolf {Mtueum <)f the CapUol). 

Assyria, Assyria and Ionian Greece did the same with 
Persia, Greece transforms the Dorian, Rome wants 
to please Greece as the parvenu does the aristocrat, 
Greece wants to please Rome as the weak does the 
strong. In this contact Greece can no longer prosti- 
tute a genius which had long since escaped from her; 
but Rome loses part of her own genius. 

The Roman, in his manners, !iis temperament, his 
religion, his whole moral substance, differed totally 
from the Greek. In the case of the latter we have a 
simple, free, investigating life, given over completely 



273 ANCIENT ART 

to realizing t!ie inner harmony which a charming 
imagination pursues along every path. In the case 
of the Roman, life is disciplined, egoistic, hard, and 
firm; it seeks its nutriment outside of itself. The 



B.ist of Til>erius, bronze 
{National Muaeiim. Itomr). 

Greek makes the city in the image of the world. The 
Roman wants to make the world in the image of the 
city. The true religion of the Roman is the hearth, 
and the chief of the hearth is the father. The official 
cult is purely decorative. The divinities are concrete 



Claudius (i Century A.D.). (Louvre.) 



274 ANCIENT ART 

things, fixed, positive, without connection, without 
harmonious envelope, one personified fact beside 
another personified fact. They belong to a domain 
apart and, in reality, quite secondary. On one side 
divine right and religion, on the other human right 
and jurisprudence. It is the contrary of Greece where 
the passage is an insensible one from man to god, from 
the real to the possible. The Greek ideal is diversity 
and continuity in the vast harmonic ensemble of actions 
and reactions. The Roman ideal is the artificial 
union of these isolated elements in a stiff and hard 
ensemble. If the art of this people is not utilitarian, 
it is certain to be conventional. 

Why should Rome take the elements of these formal 
conventions from others than Greece, who offered 
them to her.f^ There are to be, indeed, attempts at 
transformation, and even her instinct is to rebel con- 
fusedly. In spite of itself, against itself, a people is 
itself. The Greek temple cannot be transported to 
Rome, like the statues and the paintings, and when 
the Roman architect returns from Athens, from Sicily, 
or from Paestum, he has had the time on his journey 
unconsciously to transform the science he has brought 
back from those places. The column becomes thick 
and smooth, often useless, placed against the wall in 
the guise of an ornament. If the Corinthian order 
dominates, the Doric and Ionic transformed, make 
frequent appearances, often mingling or superposing 
themselves in the same monument. The temple, 
almost always larger than in Greece, loses its animation. 
It is voluntarily symmetrical, massive, heavy, positive. 



ROME 275 

Outside of Rome — in Gaul, in Greece, in Asia especially, 
Rome constructs formidable temples, resplendent with 
force and sunlight, on which the high plant growth 



Greco-Roman Abt. Wrestler, bronze 

(Zowwe). 

of the Corinthian looks like living trees cemented into 
the wall. But buildings like these are rare on Italian 
soil. In them, doubtless, Rome only played her 
habitual part of severe administrator. The temples of 
Hellenic Gaul are Greek, the temples of Asia have the 
sumptuousness and the redoubtable grandeur of every- 



276 ANCIENT ART 

thing that rises above this mystic, feverish soil, satu- 
rated with rottenness and heat, and for which time does 
not count. Everywhere, for the utilitarian monu- 
ments even — ^for the arenas of Provence (to cite no 
more than these) present themselves with a discre- 
tion, a grace, an unstudied elegance which one does 
not find in those of Italy — everywhere the native soil 
imposes on Rome its collaboration and, sometimes, 
its domination. In ornament, for example, we find 
among the Greeks, the Asiatics, the Africans, or the 
Spaniards working under the Roman constructor, the 
silent insurrection of personal sentiment. Certain 
Gallo-Roman bas-reliefs, by their savor and their 
verve, by the blithe vigor with which the stone is 
attacked, by the concrete and perhaps slightly banter- 
ing tenderness of their accent, immediately make one 
think of the leaves, the fruits, the garlands, and the 
figures which, ten centuries later, are to adorn the 
capitals, the porches, and the façades of the French 
cathedrals. It is only in the general ordonnance of 
the edifice that the Roman retains his rights. 

The Greeks variegated their monuments with ocher 
and vermilion, blue, green, and gold; the building 
shone in the light. How should the Roman under- 
stand polychromy.^ Painting has something mobile 
and fugitive about it, something almost aerial; which 
is repellent to his genius. He sees it already paling 
and wearing off from the marbles of the Acropolis, 
Therefore, he incorporates it in the material, he makes 
a temple wherein multicolored marbles, simple or 
veined, alternate with granites, porphyries, and basalts. 



Grëcu-Rouan Art. Uiut'liantt:, fresco 

(.Museum of the Vatican). 



278 ANCIENT ART 

" Harmony scarcely counts; the color is to change no 
more. 



The same transformation everj-where — in painting, 
in sculpture. The copy, even when conscientious, is 



Tomb of Cecilia ML-lt-lla (i Century B.C.)- 

alway.s unfaithful. It is made heavy, pasty, ami 
laborious; it is dead. The Greek statue maker, 
working in Rome, sometimes has beautiful awakenings, 
but he obeys the fashion— now he is classical, now 
decadent, now archaistic. As to the Roman statue 
maker, his work is to manufacture for the collector 



ROME 279 

innumerable replicas of the statues of the great period 
of Athens. It is the second step in that academism 
from which the modem world is still suffering. The 
first dated from those pupils of Polycleitus, of Myron. 



The Pont du Gard (19 B.C.). 

of Phidias, and of Praxiteles who knew tlieir trade 
too well, 

Rome encumbers itself with statues. There are the 
dead and the Hving. All those who have held public 
office, high or low, want to have under their eyes the 
material and durable witness of the fact. Far more, 
each one, if he can pay for it, wants to know in advance 
the effect that will be produced by tlie trough of 
marble in which he is to be laid away. It is not only 
tlie Imperator who is to see his military life made 
illustrious in the marble of the triumphal arches and 



280 ANCIENT ART 

columns. The centurion and the tribune surely have, 
in their public life, some high deed to hand down for 
the admiration of the future. The sculptors of t!ie 
sarcophagi devise the anecdotal bas-relief. Historical 
"genre," that special form of artistic degeneration, 
which at all times. has so comfortably kept house with 



Rome (i Century A.D.). The Colosseum. Inleriorof thearena. 

academism, is invented. The great aim is to find 
and relate as manj- heroic deeds as possible in the 
life of the great man. On five or six meters of marble 
adventures arc heaped up, personages, insignia, weapons, 
and fa.sccs are .scpieczcd in. Everything is episodic, 
and one seizes nothing of the ei>isiHie; whereas in the 
sober Greek bas-relief where nothing was epi,sodic, 
the whole signification of the sci'ne api)earc<l at a 
glance. And yet it is, above all, in these bas-reliefs 



ROME 281 

that the harsh Roman genius has left its trace. There 
is verj' often a kind of somber force and a solemnity 
there which affect us sharply, carrying with them a 
train of crushing memories — the laurels, the lictors, 
the consular purple. In these bas-reliefs there bursts 
forth a barbarous power which no education can 



Rome. Themue of Titus, central gallery. 

restrain. Sometimes, even, in the heavy chiseled 
garlands where the fruits, the flowers, and the foliage 
accumulate and heap up like the harvests and vintages 
of the strong Latin Campagna, one feels the mounting 
of the rustic sap which Rome could not dry up and 
which swells in the poems of Lucretius as in an old 
tree that sends out green shoots again. Then the 
Greeks are forgotten, and the sculptors from Athens 



282 ANCIENT ART 

must laugh în pity before these confused poems to the 
riches of the earth. And doubtless they prefer the 
heavy imitations of themselves that are made. There 
are no more empty placesj to be sure, no more silent 
passages, no longer any wave of imiting volumes that 
reply to one another in their constant need for musical 
equilibrium. But it is a disciplined orgy, even so, 
whose opulence is an element to be incorporated with 
the intoxication, of the flesh rather than inscribed in 
the mind. The landscape background of the Roman, 
on the whole, affirms itself as less stylized, doubtless, 
but more moving and sensual than the Greek setting. 
One hears the crunch of the vintagers' feet on the 
grapes, the oak offers armfiils of firm acorns and black 
leaves, the ears of wheat loaded with grains group them- 
selves into thick sheaves, we smell the floating per- 
fume of green boughs and the odor of the plowed soil 
— and the richness and density of all this sculpture 
are due, probably, to workmen only. In the produc- 
tion of the official statue maker, on the contrar>% a 
violent confusion reigns, monotonous ennui and immo- 
bility. 

Such a spirit is entirely foreign to man, it is devoted 
entirely to glorifying beings, things, and abstractions 
toward which man is not drawn by his true nature, 
but by prejudice, or the cult of the moment. And it 
was to this spirit that allegory owed the favor which 
it enjoyed under Roman academism. The great artist 
does not love illegory. If it is imposed on him, he 
dominates it, he drowns it in form, drawing from form 
itself the sense that is always in it. Allegory, on the 



Pou (i Century A.D.)- The Arena, detail. 



284 ANCIENT ART 

other hand, dominates the false artist, to whom form 
says nothing. AUegorj- is tlie caricature of the symbol. 
The symbol is the living visage of the realized abstrac- 
tion; allegory has to mark the presence of the abstrac- 
tion by external attributes. 
These cold academic studies, these mannikins of 



Sarcophagus of Julius Bossus (Valican). 

bronze and of marble, these frozen gestures — always 
the same — tiiese oratorical or martial attitudes which 
knew no change, these rolls of papjTiis. these draperies, 
these tridents, lightnings, and horns of plenty crowded 
themselves, heavy and tiresome, into all the public 
places, into forums, squares, and sanctuaries. Sar- 
cophagi and statues wore nuide in advance; the orator 
dressed in his toga, the general in his cuirass, the 
tribune, the qujrstor, the consul, the senator, or the 



imperator. could be supplied at any time. The body 
was interchangeable. The head was screwed on to 



The wife of Trajan {BrUtah Muteum). 

the shoulders. To recognize the personage one had 
to look at the face, which would sometimes be placed 
too high to be distinguishable. It was the only thing 
that did not have the appearance of having come from 



286 ANCIENT ART 

the factory. It alone responded to a need for truth, 
an obscure and material need, but a sincere one. It 
was made only after the order had been given and 
from the i>erson who ordered it; thereafter, the artist 
and the model collaborated honestly. 

There is something implacable about all these 
Roman portraits. There is no convention, but also 
no fantasy. Man or woman, emperor or noble, the 
model is followed feature bv feature, from the bone- 
structure of the face to the grain of the skin, from the 
form of the hair dressing to the irregularities of the 
noses and the brutality of the mouths. The marble 
cutter is attentive, diligent, and of complete probity. 
He does not think even of emphasizing the descriptive 
elements of the model's face, he wants to make it a 
likeness. There is not the least attempt at generalizing, 
no attempt at lies or flattery or satire — no <?oncern 
with psychology and little character, in the descriptive 
sense of the word. There is less of penetration than 
of care for exactitude. If. the artist does not lie, 
neither does the model. These are historical docu- 
ments, from the real Caesars of Rome to the adven- 
turers of Spain or of Asia, from deified monsters to 
Stoic emperors. WTiere is the classic type of the 
** profile like a medal" in these heads? They may be 
heavy or delicate, square, sharp-featured, or round, 
at times dreamy, often wicked, but they are always 
true, whether puffed-up play actors, slightly foolish 
idealists, whollv incurable brutes, weather-beaten 
old centurions, or crowncnl hetuinr who are not even 
pretty. Some of these» heads, certainly, through their 



288 ANCIENT ART 

quality of attention, and the intensity with which 
life concentrates in them, by their density and mass, 
by the pitiless pursuit of the profound modeling which 
the bone structure of the interrogated face possesses 
by chance and reveals to the sculptor, are of a powerful 
beauty. In the statue of the Great Vestal, for example, 
immediate truth attains the stage of typical truth: 
then the whole of Rome, with its domination of itself, 
and the weight it laid on the world, appears in this 
strong and grave woman; it is as solid as the citadel, 
as safe as the hearth, without humanity, without 
tenderness, and without weakness, until the day when 
slowly, deeply, irresistibly, it is to have plowed its 
furrow. 

rv 

We must turn our back on the temples, give scarcely 
a glance to the massive arches and columns of triumph. 
Around them the brutal mounting of the processions 
lifts the power of Rome to an empyrean no higher than 
their summit. The Rome, which wanted to be and 
believed itself to. be an artist, put the whole* of its 
native genius into the marble portraits and into certain 
bas-reliefs of startling authority and ruggedness. To 
find this genius again in more characteristic and dis- 
proportionately imposing manifestations, we must 
leave the domain of art, properly so-called, of that 
superior function whose role is to exalt all the higher 
activities of the intelligence and of love. We must 
consider the expressions of Rome's positive and mate- 
rialistic daily life. Rome had no other moral need 



ROME 289 

than that of proclaiming her external glory, and any 
monument sufficed for that, provided it was graced 
with the name of temple, arch of triumph, rostrum, 
or trophy. But Rome had great needs in matters of 
health, physical strength, and, later on — in order to 
pour out this health and strength which had grown 



Temple of Juptt«r at Boalbeck, detail (ii Century A.D,). 

too heavy to bear after the end of the wars — it had 
great need of food, of women, and of violent games'. 
Hence the paved roads, the bridges, and aqueducts 
at first, and afterwards the theaters, the baths, and the 
circuses — blood and meat after travel and water. 

The Roman ideal throughout history has the uni- 
formity and the constancy of an administrative regu- 
lation. In Rome the real artist is the engineer, as 



290 ANCIENT ART 

the true poet is the historian and the true philosopher 
is the jurist. The Roman imposes on the family, on 
society, and on nature the form of his will. He 
represses his instinct for rapine; by living on himself 
he acquires the moral vigor necessary to conquer the 
earth; he escapes from his arid surroundings by 
reaching out with his tentacles of stone to the ends of 
the world. He plans the whole of his work — his law, 
his annals, and his roads, with one paving stone after 
the other, just as, starting from Rome, he extends 
over the plains, the mountains, and the sea, circle 
after circle of his domination. 

The pride of this people and its strength were the 
sites where it dwelt — a few low hills amid the marshes, 
from which the inhabitants of the Sabine heights and 
the plowman of Latium flee. There is neither bread 
nor water, the view is closed by a distant circle of 
hostile mountains. It is a refuge of pariahs, but of 
violent and voracious pariahs who know that there 
are fat lands, rich cities, and herds behind the horizon. 
Cost what it may, they must break through the 
accursed circle. The race is to draw its strength from 
the mountain springs which rigid paths of stone are 
to spread in torrents over Rome. Rigid lines of stone 
are to direct that force across the dry marshes, across 
the open forests, the rivers, solitudes, and mountains, 
to the light of the south and the mists of the north. 
Cement binds the stones and the slabs of the pave- 
ment, making of them a single, continuous block, from 
the center of the inhabited world to its boundaries. 
Blood starts from the heart. Rome is in the whole 



ROME 291 

empire, the whole empire is in Rome. The ancient 
world is an immense oasis of woods, of plowed lands, 
of opulent cities, and fecund oceans; Rome is a mass 
of waits and huts, a surge, black and low, of the dens of 
the people; its noise never ceases, it crowns itself 



Orange (ii Century A.D.). Tlie Theater. 

laboriously with hard buildings of stone, heavy in their 
form and in their silence. Between the world and the 
city lies a mournful desert crossed by rigid arteries; 
as far as the circle of the horizon, it is a sad tract of 
country, undulating like a sea under the sun or the 
night. 

Thus to weld this isolated city to the rest of the 
world, materially and morally, an enormous pride was 
needed, an enormous energy, and enormous works 
that increased this energy, exalted this pride, and 



292 ANCIENT ART 

incited it to undertake works still more enormous. 
Under the Empire the tendency toward the enormous 
quickens till it becomes a wild pace. More aqueducts, 
bridges, and roads, more stones beside stones. With 
Asia subjected and peace imposed, the thirst for 
pleasure and the freedom needed for it made their 
entry into Rome. The city gives itself up to enjoy- 
ment with all the strength it had devoted to conquest 
and authority. The enormous is in demand more 
and more — ^in play, in love, in idleness, as in war, law, 
history, and the construction of the city. Rome is 
no longer content to make the pulsations of its heart 
felt to the limits of her empire, she is not to rest until 
she has brought the material of the empire back to 
herself. Men of all races congest her streets, bringing 
with them their manners, their gods, and their soil. 
"The climates are conquered, nature is subjected; the 
African giraffe and the Indian elephant walk about 
Rome under a movable forest; vessels fight on land.*'^ 
After the aqueducts and the roads, amphitheaters are 
constructed, circuses in which armies kill each other, 
where eighty thousand Romans can see all the beasts 
of the desert, forest, and mountain let loose upon men, 
while pools of hot blood dampen the blood already 
clotted. Thermae are built with tanks in which three 
thousand persons can bathe at ease, immense tepi- 
dariums, promenades with monstrous vaults, where 
the idler passes his day amid women, dancers, musi* 
cians, rhetoricians, sophists, and statues brought from 
Greece. But the soul of Greece did not enter with 

^ Michelet, Bistoire Romaine. 



ROME 293 

them. The Greek, even to the days of his saddest 
decline, loved these forms for themselves. The Roman 
sees in them a fit frame for his orgj' of the flesh, of 
blood, of streaming waters. He plunges with frenzy 
into his heavy sensuality. 
But in that, at leajst, without knowing it, he is an 



Arena of Nimes (ii Century A.D.). 

artist. The activity is of a low form, doubtless — quite 
positive, egoistic, cruel, and not to be freed from 
materialism. But the organization it calls forth is 
so powerfully adapted to it, that it thereby acquires 
a crushing, rare, direct, and monotonous splendor. 
Thus in all eases, at the bottom of the scale as at the 
top, on the lowest step of the temple as in its pediment, 
in the material as in the moral order, the beautiful 
and the useful mysteriously agree. 

The official religious architecture is flooded with 
ornaments, quadrigas. bas-reliefs, allegories, and false 



294 ANCIENT ART 

columns. The Corînthîan column whîch, wîth the 
leaves of its capital crushed by the entablature, was 
so illogical that the Greeks hardly ever used it, seems 
invented to permit the Romans to display, in stupefy- 
ing contrast, the lack of artistic intelligence of those 
among them who were intrusted with preserving the 
city of art. As soon as they use ornament, their 
architecture loses its beauty, because it loses its logic. 
And the same error occurs every time they aim at 
effect before considering function. Here are silver 
cups of the Romans, their bowls cluttered with chiseled 
forms. One can scarcely drink from them. A lover 
of enjoyment and the positive life, the Rotnan goes 
astray when he approaches speculation, the general 
idea, the symbol. As soon as it is a question of satis- 
fying his material instincts, he says admirable things. 
There are no ornaments on his aqueducts, his 
bridges, or his therma*, very few on his amphitheaters, 
and these are, with those positive portraits, his only 
real works of art. Bare, straight, categorical, accept- 
ing their role, they present to us their terrible walls, 
piles of matter gilded by the southern fire, crackled 
and whitened by the frosts of the north. They present 
their aerial vaults on cyclopean pillars, the lines of 
giant arches bestriding the valleys and the swamps, 
bursting through rocky barriers or sealing them — as 
sure, in their vertical rise or their progression, as 
cliffs or as herds of primitive monsters. The goal 
toward which they aim gives them a look of implac- 
ability. They have the inflexibility of mathematics, 
the force of the will, the authority of pride. 



ROME 295 

They have the lightness of the foliage that quivers 

at the top of the trees, sixty feet above the ground. 

The arch, the vaults of various kinds, the corridors, 

and the cupolas, a thousand blocks of granite are, for 



Rome. Antonine column {ii Century A.D.)- Execution of 
tlie Gemianic chiefs, ilctatl. 

twenty centuries, suspended in the air like leaves. 
They cannot crumble before the infiltration of water 
and the assault of the winds and the sun have uprooted 
their trunks; they have an air of being natural growths 
which would outlast all winters. To jietrify the depth 
of the azure, the depth of the tree top ! It needed tlie 
imagination of man to realize the miracle of offering 
to the crowds, as Uieir perpetual shelter, the curves 
which bent over the curve of tlie earth. It needed 
the audacity of man to su-spend matter in space by 



296 ANCIENT ART 

its own weight, to stick stones to one another by leav- 
ing so little space between them that they cannot fall, 
to check their tendency to separate by thickening the 
pillars that bear them, until a point of absolute solidity 
is reached. 

The higher it is, the straighter it is; the barer, the 
denser; the less of light, the fewer openings and empty 
spaces it offers, the better the wall presents, on the 
smiling or dramatic face of the soil, the image of will, 
of energy, of continuity in effort. The Roman wall 
is one of the great things of history. And, as it is 
Might, it is Right. It seems to be uninterrupted, it 
holds forever, even when split and fissured. The 
fall of a thousand stones does not shake it. For ten 
centuries all the houses of Rome were built of the 
stones of the Colosseum. The Colosseum has not 
changed its form. The Roman wall remains identical 
with itself everywhere. The pavement of the roads, 
which for two hundred leagues pursues its rigid march, 
is only a wall lying on the earth to embrace it and 
enslave it. The arch of the bridges, which is only a 
wall bent like the wood of a bow, draws taut the pas- 
sive bowstring of the rivers. The wall of the aqueducts, 
hollowed out like the beds of the rivers themselves, 
carried their waters in a straight line wherever the 
sedile wants them to go. High and bare, the outer 
wall of the theater prevents those whose appetite or 
rebellion is to be overcome from peering into the free 
expanse of the horizon. The wall of the circuses, 
continuous and compact as a circle of bronze, incloses 
the bloody orgy within the geometrical rigor of a law. 



The Great VesUl (in Century A.D.). 
(National Mtueitm, Rome.) 



398 ANCIENT ART 

The wall that rounds itself over the tepidarium and 
the swimming pools, with the docility of an atmos- 
phere kept within in its spherical boundaries by the 
gravitation of the heavens, confers on voluptuousness 
and hygiene the grand authority of a natural order. 

It was in Rome that the Pelasgic poem of the wall, 
developed so sensitively and wisely by the Greeks 



Vase from the Treasury of Bemay, silver 

{Biblintheque Nationale). 

and the Etruscans, found its most powerful and dura- 
ble expressions. It was in Rome that the applications 
of the Asiatic vault were the most various, its use the 
most frequent, its emploj-ment the most methodical. 
The vault, in Chaldea and in Assyria, had lengthened 
itself out, weighed down on the palaces and houses 
or swelled above them, and himg over the cities. In 
Rome it is the verj' base of every utilitarian construc- 
tion, and the grc.ilcr part of the arelii tectonic forms 



ROME 293 

derive from its presence — the arches of the bridges, 
the portals, the corridors around the circuses, the 
immensity of the lialls made possible by the might 
of the walls, the power of the supports, required by 
the height of tlie edifice, the circular monuments — 



Gallo-Romam Art (beginaing of the in Century). Wild 
B.«r (Museum of Orleans). 

images of the horizon, of the plains bearing the cupola 
of the sky. 

The Tombs of Cecilia Metella, the Mole of Hadrian, 
and the Pantheon of Agrippa especially, are epitomes 
of the force of Rome and of the severe and savage 
ring of hills, the circus in the center of which it is 
built. It is a sad power that it possesses; the full 
walls are as rough as the hide of a monster, the interior 
is as secret and jealous as the soul of this people. 



300 ANCIENT ART 

which did not consent to manifest itself before having 
stripped from every other people the right to discuss 
that soul. The thing weighs on the crust of the earth 
and seems to emanate from it. At the top of the 
Pantheon a circular opening lets in the light of heaven. 
It falls as if regretfully, and never succeeds in illuminat- 
ing the farther corners. Rome is self-willed and closed. 

It is only into the stone circuses that the sun entered 
in a flood, to light up the spectacles which the tamed 
world gave to Rome while it waited till it should gather 
up in the city its hatred, revolt, and thirst for purifi- 
cation. Panem et Circenses! The Colosseum is noth- 
ing but the formula in stone of the monstrous needs 
of the king-people. The patrician no longer has war 
at his command to occupy the plebeian. Here is 
bread — here are circuses, in which a whole city can 
be seated and which are built in such a way that from 
each of the seats one can witness the death struggle 
of that city. Never has there been seen under the 
heavens a theater better arranged for presenting the 
spectacle of a suicide than that one. 

The equilibrium of Rome had not the spontaneous 
and philosophic character of the equilibrium of Athens, 
and this does not result so much from the multiform 
extent of the Roman Empire as from the depth of its 
moral anarchy. Greece, while at war with Persia, 
was much nearer to harmony than Rome was at the 
very hour when she decreed peace. Her repose, her 
art, her pleasure, even, were of an administrative order. 
The struggle of interests, the rivalry of classes, and 
the social disorder continued from the early days of 



Gallo-Roman Art. Altar {Church of Verecowi). 



302 ANCIENT ART 

the Republic to the triumph of Christianity. Through- 
out Roman history the poor man struggles against 
the rich man, who holds him, first by war, then by 
games. But below the poor man there was a more 
miserable being who rarely saw the games, save as 
an actor in them. This was the slave, the dark rumb- 
ling of Subiura and the Catacombs, and woman, 
another slave, outraged every day and by all, in her 
flesh and in her tenderness. The being who lives in 
the shadows ceaselessly calls upon the sun to rise 
within him. The mystic tide of the poor, the tide 
bom of Hellenic scepticism was mounting and was to 
submerge Roman materialism. Rome did not dream, 

m 

doubtless, that the day on which she broke the fright- 
ful resistance of the little Jewish people marked the 
beginning of the victory of the little Jewish people 
over herself. It was in thé law of things that the soul 
of the ancient world, compressed by Rome, should 
flow back into the soul of Rome. The patricians had 
been dominated by the Greek ideal; the plebeians, 
in their turn, were dominated by the Jewish ideal. 

The church was to be built on this hard stone, and 
the rich man was again to enslave the poor man by 
giving him the promise, or the simulacrum, of tlie 
well-being to wliich he laid claim. Rome, by becoming 
Christian, did not cease to be herself; as she had 
remained Rome when she thought she had become 
Hellenistic. The apostles had already veiled the fact^ 
of Christ. Rome had no trouble in casting the feeling 
of the masses in the mold of her will to launch them 
anew upon the conquest of the earth. Her material 



ROME 303 

desire for world-empire was to reawaken upon coming 
into contact with the dream of universal moral com- 
munion, which Christianity, after far-away Buddhism, 
implanted in the souls of men; and it was to transform 
this dream to its profit. Julian the Apostate, the last 
hero who appeared on the dark earth before the fall 
of the sun, thought he was combating the religion of 



Cinerary urn {Nalional Museum, Rome). 

Asia. It was already against Rome that he was 
struggling, and Rome had the habit of conquering. 
The men of the north, flood after flood, may descend 
toward the Mediterranean, the great mirror of the 
divine figures, the inexhaustible basin of rays to 
which all the ancient peoples came to draw up light. 
Rome, buried under incessant human waves for more 
than a thousand years, is to remain Rome, and when 
she reappears at the head of the peoples, the peoples 
are -to perceive that they are marked with her imprint. 



Gallo-Roman Akt (i Century A.D.), 
Altar of Jupiter {Cluny Museum). 



ALPHABETICAL INDEX 

OF THE NAMES CITED IN TfflS VOLUME ^ 



Abraham, 117. 

^schylus, 119, 148, 176, 226, 247. 

Agamemnon, 117. 

Alexander, 110, 208. 

Anaxagoras, 150. 

Anienor, 152. 

Apelles, 250. 

Arijftocles, 134. 

Aristophanes, 156, 233. 

Assurbanipal, 90. 

Augustus, 218. 

Baudelaire, xviii. 
Bernini, xl. 
Bryaxvf, 201. 
Brygos, 252. 

Cambyses, 76. 

Carrière (Eugène), xxvii. 

Cervantes, xxix. 

Cézanne, xli, xHi. 

Clarke, xl. 

Clexthas, 134. 

Cyrus, 101. 

Darius, 106. 
Diderot, 254. 
Dourù, 252. 

Endows, 138. 
Euphrottius, 252. 
Euripides, 194. 
Evans, 116. 

Giorgione, 251. 
Guyau, xxiii. 



JlagelaideSf 134. 
Hannibal, 270. 
Heraclitus, 160. 
Homer, 116. 

Ictinos, 176. 

Jesus Christ, xxxiv, 226, 228. 
Julian the Apostate, 303. 
Juvenal, 270. 

Kanakhos, 134. 

Kant, xxiii. 

Kock (Paul de), xl. 

Lamarck, xxxiv. 
Leochares, xl, xlii. 
Lucian of Samosate, 212. 
Lucretius, 270, 281. 
Lyaippus, 200, 223. 

Maret, xl. 

Masaccio, 248. 

Michael Angelo, xviii, xxx, xl, xliv, 

215. 
Michelet, xviii, 292. 
Moses, 117. 
Mimimius, 270. 
Myron, 154, 156, 279. 

Napoleon, xl. 
Newton, xxxiv. 

Parrhasios, 250, 251. 
PasUeles, 218. 
Pericles, 156. 



'The names of the artists who are directly in question arc printed in 
Italics. 



ALPHABETICAL INDEX 



Pkidiat, xi\, ixxiv. xl. xlii. xliv. 140, 


SrOfHi,. 201. 210, 


ISO, 1S6. 182, 163, m. 178, 184, 




I»«. 210, 218, 226, 24Î, 246. «79. 


Stnnachcrib, 90. 


Pindar. 148. 247. 


Socrates. ISO. 226. 


Pisistratu», lis. 138. 


Solomon, 105. 


Plato, xïiv, 130. 


Sophoi-les, 148. 178. 


Plautiu. 270. 


SpencCT (Herbert), J 


PolycUilui, 154. 1S6, Î7». 


Sulty (James). 14. 


Polggnotut. 250. 




Praxiula, 192, 164, 106, 214. 224, 


Taine, xviii. 


231. 270, 


Theocritus. 240. 


Pyrrhus, 270. 


Titian. 251. 


I^lhagoraa, 226. 


Tolstoi, XÏ. 


llenoir, xli. dii. 


Vergil. Î70. 


Hodin (Auguste), xxiv. 
Hiibcns, ilii. 


Winckeimann, xliii. 


Saint Paul. 220. 


Xerxes, 140. 


Sargon. 00, 




Sclilicmann, 116, 117. 


ZcuxU.i50. 



SYNOPTIC TABLES 



SIGNS AND ABBREVIATIONS 

KmpUtyed in the ai/noplic tables 

a. iVrchitect, Sp. Spain. A. Attic School, 

s. Sculptor. Af. Africa. Ag. Argive School, 

p. Painter. A. M. Asia Minor. M. i£ginetan School, 

c. Ceramist. M. G. Magna Gnecia. S. Sicyonic School. 

The nanies uf painters, sculptors, architects, ceramists, 
and other workers in the plastic arts are in italics. The 
names of the principal masters are in hea\y type. 

Only such monuments are mentioned in the synoptic 
tables as still exist or of which there are fragments of sufficient 
importance to constitute a work which possesses interest 
from tlie artistic or archieological point of view. Exception 
is made in the case of destroyed monuments of particular 
celebrity, as the temple of Hera at Olympia (the earliest 
Greek temple kno«Ti), the Colossus of Rhodes, the Tower 
of Babel, the Temple of Solomon, the Sanctuary of Eleusis, 
and the Asclepieion of Epidaurus. 



Gallo-Roman Art {hi Century A.D.). (Museum of Sem.) 



B.C.I 



300th century 
(?) 



200th century 
(?) 



100th century 
(?) 



75th century 
(?) 



60th century 
(?) 



50th century 
(?) 



40th century 



35th century 



Prehistoric Lands 



Basin of the Garonne. 

Vésère-Pyreneee, etc. 

(Cave-dwelling reindeer 

hunters) 



SpUt-ofiF flints 



Arms and tools of bone 

Carved bones and stones 

(Bruniquel, Laugerie- 

Basse, Laugerie-Haute. 
Mas d'Axil, Lorthet, La 
Medeleine, Brassempouy, 
Baoussé-Roussé, Cro- 
Magnon. Le Moustier. 
Arudy, Gourdan. Lourdes, 
Cap-Blano, Willendorff, 
etc.) 



Painted and engraved 
walls 



(Ck>mbarelle8, Fond de 
Gaume, Le Tuo d'Au 
doubert, Bernifal, La 
Mouthe, Marsoulas, 

Niauz. Salitré, Laussel, 
Comarque» Teyjat, Pair- 
Non-Pair, Covalanas, 
Castillo, Tortosilla, Ho- 
mos de la Peâa, Altamira, 
etc.) 



Split-off flints 



Scandinavia, 

France, Switzerland 

(Lake cities) 



Polished flints 



Asia 



EOTPT 



Chaldea* 



Carved flints 



Carved flints 



Potteries 



Wrought metals 



Stone and ivory statuettee 



Greece 



Rome 



Geological Epochs^ 



Glacial period 
Epoch of Âurignac 
Paleolithic epoch 

(Chelles) 



(Le Moustier) 
(Solutré) 

Mngdalenian epoch 



Totemiflxn 



Warm and moist period 

Neolithic epoch 
Totemism 



Sothio period, Claraic calendar (4240) 
Hieroglyphic writing (7) 
Babylon. Astronomy 



Fou-Hi. Chinese legislator (3468?) 



' The dates are merely approximations 
and may vary by many centuries. 



B.C.^ 



Prehistoric Lands 



83d century 



30th century 



2^th century 



25th century 



22d century 



2l8t century 



Necklaces, Bracelets, 
Potteries 



scandinavla.,» 

France, Brittany, 

Spain, England 

(MegcUithic monumenta) 



Menhin 



JDolmens 



Trill ths 



Cromlechs 



20th century 


* 




Alignments 


19th century 




18th century 






Covered alley» 


17th century 




loth century 


Meealithic monuments 


15th century 


Megalithic monuments 




MeRalithic monuments 



Asia 



EOTPT 



Observatory Temples 
(The Tower of Babel) 



Engraved cylinders 



Palace of Tello 
Statues of Goudea 

Stele of the Vultures 

Cheo-tlang invents painting in 
China (?) 



Megalithic monuments in India 



The Chinese scale (?) 



Ancient Empire * 
{Memphis, I to X Dyna^U^ 



Sphinx of Giseh, Thinite Hyp 
gece of ^Abydos, Hieracotip.. 
and Negadyie Pyramid of hif 
at Sakkarah 
Temple of pink Krmnite 
Archaic statues of diorite 
Pyramid of Meidoun 



Temple of Ourou in Chaldea 



Code of the Laws of Hammu- 
rabi in Chaldea (on stone) 

First Chinese bronze (?) 



First Chinese ceramics (?) 



Statue of N:«pir-A90U in 
Chaldea 



Hypogées of Sakkarah 

Pyramids of Glieh 

Mastaba of Giseh 

Limestone statues 

Archaic paintings 

Mastaba of Ti, a. in chief. :i: 

Sakkarah 

Pyramids of Aboufir 

Mastaba of Ptahbotep at ^a' 

karah 
Apogee of sculpture and paint- 

ing 

Pyramid of Ounos at Sakkarah 

Mastaba of Mer* 

Pyramids of Sakkarah 

Seated Scribe of the Lourrc 

MiDDLS Empirk I 
(Thebes, XI to XVl Dynasiu 

Obelisk of Heliopolia 

Hypogées of Smt 
Hypogées of Abydos 
Pyramids of Fayoum 

Great Temple of Amon at 
Karnak 

Hv'pogecs of Beni-Haasan 

Hypogées of Assaouan 

Apogee of jeweler's art and gtJ.. 

smith's art 

Industrial and intima t4> art 

Pyramid of Dahchour 

Classic funerary sculpture 

The labyTinth (Tenjpie of 
Haouara) 

Colossus of Sowakhot<*p HI 

Sphinx of TaniA 

The bearer of offerings of tb- 

Louvre 

Hypogées, pait'tinss 



New Empire > 
(Thebes. XVI I to XX 
naaiie») 



I>^ 



Academic funerary soulpturr 
Temple of Dcir el-bahri 



Temple of Amada 

First hypogées of Biban el- 

Moluk 



CÎRBECK 



Mokas Period > 
iCreie, Argolis, Archipelago, Troy) 



I 



Cyclopean walls 
Palace of Phaestos in Crete 



Pelasgic walls 



Wrought metals, potteries 
iTroad) 



Terra cottas 
iTroatl) 



Vase of the reapers of Phaestos 



Palace of Tyrinth 
(Bas-reliefs, frescoes, pottery) 



Marble idols 

Palace of Knossos, Crete 
(Bas-reliefs, frescoes, pottcr>') 



ROMX 



Geological Epochs > 



Meneg founds the Egyptian empire 

(33(X)?) 

The great dike « 



Exploitation of the mines of Sinai 



Cheopê, Khephren, Pharaohs 



The House of the Books 



Dynasty of the fJia in China (2205) 



Abraham. The patriarchs of lerad 



The Hebrews in Egypt (?) 



Power of Sidon. Cuneiform writ- 
ing (?) 

Lake Mœris (?) 



Conquest of Nubia by the Egyptians 
Invention of papyrus (?) 



Invasion of the Kyksos in Egypt 



The Aryans in India (?)— The Rig- 
Veda (?) 
Egypt expels the Hyksos 



The Mesopotamian canab (7) 



Minon 



Vattya (?)— The Mahabarata (?) 



The Phœnicians invent the alphabet 



> The dates are merely approximations 
and may vary by many centuries. 



B.C.I 



Prehistoric Lands 



Asia 



14th century 



Megalithio monuments 



13th century 



Megalithio monuments 



Phoenician textiles, potteries, 
and glass 



12th century 



Megalithio monuments 
Bronze weapons and tools 



11th century 



10th century 



Bronze weapons and tools 



Bronze weapons and tools 



Hittite art 



First Chinese jades (?) 



Cypriote art 



Bronse weapons and tools 



Hiramt Phœnician, a. 



Temple of Jerusalem 



Egypt 



Speos of Gebel SiLal^' 
Hypogées of CheLk «4 Abd t4- 
Kouma 

Sentnoiit, a. 
Colossuses of Memnon 
Temple of Amenophis III àt 
El-Kab 
Temple of Luxor 
Hypogées of £U-Aniama 



Temple of Sethos I at Kourcj 

Temple of Sethos I at Ab^xi'^-^ 

Great hypostyle hall of Kami- 

Meïy, a. in chief of Theb<- 

The Sera peu m 

The Ramei&seuxn 

Colossus of Runiei^e» II 

Great temple and co1cam»usc-$ ^ 

Ibsamboul 

Cavern-temple of Gcrf- 

Housem 

Temple of Beit-el-<>xialli 

Temple of Hath or at Ibis&in- 

boui 

Temple of Seboua 

Speos of I>err 

Restorations of monuinenté 

Hyp<^ees of Biban-el-MoIuk 

Temple of Khonsou at Karsa* 

Great temple of Rames^i III 
at Medinet Abou 

Tomb of the Queens at Medinrt- 
Abou 

Hypogées of Biban-el-Moluk 



Jewelry — Goldsmith's art 
Industrial and intimate art 



Saite Empire 



{Ddta, XXI to XXX Dy- 

ruutUt) (950) 



Greece 



Mycenean potteries 



Treasuries with cupolas 
Palace of Mycene 



Gate of the Lions at Mycene 
Potteriea, terra cottas 



Treasure' of Orchomene 

Tombs of Mycene 
(.lewels and masks of gold) 



Vases of Vaphio 



HBLi.BNtc Period 



First terra cottas at Tanagra 



Rome 



History 



Conquest of Assyria by the Ficyptians 



Moses. — The Hebrews depart from 
Egypt 



Power of Tyre 



RameneH II (Sesostris ?) (1330?-1265?) 



Ramears III (Sesostris?) (12307-1200?) 



Trojan War 



Chou r y nasty in Chin» (1 122) 
The judges in Israel 



Invasions of the Dorians in Greece and 
in Crete 



Homer 



David (009-959) 



Solomon (959-929) 



Nineveh 



> The dates are merely approximations 



B.c.» 



9th century 



8th century 



Pre HISTORIC Land» 



Asia 



Bronte weapons and tools 



Bronie weapons and tooln 



Assyria 

Zigurats (towers of stages) 
Hanging gardens 



Bas-reliefs 
(Monsters, winged geniuses. 

kings and warriors, 

scenes of hunting, and war 

animals) 



Engraved cylinders 



Palace and bas-relief* of 
Nimrod 



Palace and bas-reliefs of 
Khorsabad 



Palace of Zindjirbi 



Palace of Dour-Sharroukin 



Megalithic monuments 



7th century 



Bronze weapons and tools 



Palace and bas-relief» of 
Koujoundjick 



Reconstruction of the Tower 
of Babel 



Egypt 



Jewdry — Goldsmith's an 
Industrial and intimate an 



Industrial and intimate sr 



(Ecyptlaa Rwiil— anc»' 



Seated chiefs of cities 



Portraits 



Restorations of temples 



Jewelry — Goldsmith's art 
Industrial and intimate art 



Statuettes of women 



Greece 



Dipylon vases at Athens 



Xoana (wooden idols) 



(The Dori« Ord«r) 



Temple of Hera at Olympia 



Corinthian vases 



Rhcecu» and Theodorus mold in 
bronxe 



Home 



First coins 

Feminine statue of Eleutherma 
(Crete) 



Temple of Selinus (628). M.G. 



Artemis of Delos 



Mikkiadea, s. of Chios 



(The lonio Ord«r) 



Cheritiphron, a. of the first temple 
of Ephesus A. M. 

Temple of Corinth 



Etruscan art 



Funerary urns 



Etruscan paintings and tombs 



(Th« Tutoan Order) 



Etruscan vases 
(Importations from Greece) 



HlHTOHV 



Elijah —The prophets in Israel 



Lyrurgun in Sparta (884) 
A'iJurnarTipal (885-800) 



The JehoTt^t. Genesis (?) 

Struggle of the Assyrians and the 
liittitcs 

Founding of Carthage 

Hesiod 

Era of the Olympiads (776) 

Archilochus 



Founding of Rome (753) 
Era of Nabonassar (747) 



Imiah (774-r>00) 

.Jargon (722-705) 

Greek oolonies in Italy and in Sicily 



Sennacherib (705-681) destroys Baby- 
lon ((i92) 



Confjuest of Egypt by the Assyrians 

(071) 



Ai<surbanipal (607-25) 



TyrUrua 



Laws of Draco (614) 

The Phœnicians make the tour of 

Africa (000) 
The Mctlea destroy Nineveh (608) 

Jeremiah (650-590) 

Founding of Marseilles (600) 



1 The dates are approximate. 



21 




Cth century 



Prehistoric Lanuh 




Megalithic monuments 
RroDEC wcapoDH ami tools 



5th century 
(First half) 



MBDr>-PBRAIAN EuPIRE 

{Assyro-Bgypto-lonic Art 



Reconatructîon of the Temple 
of .Soloinon 



Palace of Pcreepolis 

Tomb of Cyrus at Pasargadcs 
Bas-rr.liefs of Behiatoun 



Apadana of Susa 

Bicephalous bulls 

Frieze of the archers and the 
lioiu^ 



Megalithic monuments 



Tomb of Darius at Persepolia 



Monuments of Istakhr 



Egypt 



Statu'^ttes aDd portraits 



Jewelry — Golclsmith'» f^ 
Industrial and intin^ti- -.". 



Jewelry — Goldsmith's ar: 
Industrial and intima t^e ^r: 



Greece 

(Ahooh, Sicyon, Sparta) 

Vases (black on red) 

Folymedes, Ag. a. 

Dorian ApoUos 



Dispoinog and SkiUys, Cretan ss. 

Hera of Samoa (580) 
Temple of Zeus at Syracuse, M.G. 

Archemos, s. of Chios 
Temple of Selinus, M.G. 



Nike of Deloe 

Cleothas and Aristoclea, 8. ss. 

Kanakhos, S. s. 

Polygonal wall of Delphi 

Eroiftinos, Klitias, Exekiwf, 

c. and p. 

Basilica of Paestum, M.G. 
Statue of Chares 

Parthenon of Pisistratus 
Uagelaidat Ag. s. 

EndoioA, A. B. 

The Moscophorus 

Boupalos and Athenis, ss. of Chios 
Temple of Apollo at Delphi 

Vases (red on black) 

The treasury of the Cnidians at 
Delphi 

Eumaros, p. 
Orantes of the Acropolis 

Balhyrlea. s. of Magnesia 
Great temple of Herakles at 
Agrigentum, M.G. 

Stele of Aristion 
Temple of Metaponte, M.G. 

Antenor, A. h. 
The Tyrannicides 



(Athens) 

Calon A.E. s. 

Temple of i£gina 

(rlaucos and Dionysos, Ag. ss. 

Ephebe of the Acropolis 

Cimon of Cleon», p. 

HegUiH and M icon, \. ». 

Temple of Demeter at Psestum, 

M.G. 

Paturnos, -\g. p. 

Demeter of Eleusis 

Glaucias, A.E. s. 



Rome 



The' Cloaca Maxima of Home 
(Etruscan) 



Etruscan paintings and tombs 



The sho-wolf of the Capitol 
(Etruscan) 



nUck stone of the Forum (') 



Temple of Tarquinius Superbus 
at Rome (.W9) 



Etruscan tombs 



History 



Founding of Cyrene (598) 
Nebuchadnezzar (004-501) rebuilds 

Babylon (5»7) 
Solon (594) 



The Pythian games (586) 

Captivity of Babylon (585-535). 

The Isthmic games [Ezekiel 



Alceus, Sappho 
Empedoclea 



Zoroaster (?) the A vesta (?) 



Lao-Tsze (604-529) 

Sakyamuni (The Buddha) (?) 

Pisifttrafut (500-527) 

Anacrcon 

Cyrus (500-29) takes Babylon (538) 

Iferaditxis (570-480) 

Camhysrs (529-22) conquers Egypt 

(528) 



Pythagoras (552-472) 



Athenian Republic — Roman Republic 
(509) 



Con/urius {Kung Fu Tze) (551-479) 

Theognia of Megara 

Arisiidea (540-408) 

Darius (521-485) 

Athens repulses Asia 

Marathon (490). Miltiadea (?-489) 



Sack of Athens. Salamis (480). Themia- 
torles (525-459), Platœa. Mycale 
(479). /^ati«aHi<w (?-474) 

^schylus (525-456) 

Pindar (522-442) 



B.c. ' Pkehistokic Landm 



Asia 



Egypt 



Brunse weapons ami tool.** 



Tombs of the Achemenidfs 



MeKulithir nioiiuiiitiitM | 



5th century 
(2d half) 



llerodotxu visits £Ieypt 



IliHiiano-Phfpnician bust of 



HriHi/p \v«':ipoii>' .iti'l t (11(1 i 



Mcff:ilithip iiioiiiiniPMts 



Grbbck 



Rome 



HlhTOUV 



Pythagoras and Onataa, A.E. s». 

Terra cottaa of Tanagra 

Dancers of Herculaneum 

Temple of Hera at Aerigentuni. 

M.G. 
The Charioteer of Delphi (462) 

Libon, a. of the 

Temple of Zeus at Olympia (4(>0) 

(Centaurs and Lapiths) 

The Ions walls (460-445) 

Critias, Nesiotes, and Calami», 

A. ss. 

Temple of Zeus at Agrigentuni, 

M.G. 

Polycleitus. A. s. 

Temple of Concord at Agrigen- 

tum, M. G. 

Theater of Syracuse, M.G. 

Myron, A. s. The Discus Thrower 

Temple of Neptune at Pœstum, 

M.G. 

The Thcseion 

Phidias, A s. (49(M31) 

Ictonoa, A. a. of 

The Parthenon (447-32) 

and the sanctuary of Eleusis 

Alcamene and Faonioê, A. ss. 

Polyanotus, A. p. 

Agoracritun, A. s. 

Dourin, Euphronios, and 

Brygos, A. cc. 

Temple of Segesta, M.G. 

MneffiHrs. A. a. of 
The Propylœa (437) 

Temple of Cape Sunion 

Theater of Segesta (?). M.G. 

Temple of Zeus at Neniea 

Sicilian coins, M.G. 

•lewelry — Goldsmith's art 
Industrial and intimate art 

Temple of Phigalia (419) 

The Ercchteion (415) 

Kallimachos, a. 

(The Corinthian Ordar) 

Temple of the Wingless Victory 

The Dancers of Delphi 

Euryelus of Syracuse, M.G. 
(402-397) 

Bas-relief of Leda (Athens) 

Stadium of Delphi (?) 

f^olycldtus the Younger, a. of the 

Theater of Epidaurus 

Daedalo». A. s. 

Asclepicion of Epidaurus 



Etruscan wall» of Norma and of 
Alatri (?) 



Etruscan tombs 



Rebuilding of Athens 



Cimon (?-449) 



I'eridtx (494-420) Hegemony of 
Athens 



I 



The Law of the Twelve Tables at Ronu 



SophncUs (495-406) 

llirodo'ux (4S4-400) 
Euripidc-i (4SO-40«l) 

Dcmorrilu.^ (490-380) 
Thucydide» (471-401) 
SamtttK (409-399) 

Alnhiadts (4.50-404) 

Wars of the PeloponnoHU» (431-404/ 

Arixtophiincfi (455-38S) 

llippoitatc» (460-3>>0) 
llogoniony of Sparta 



Rftrrat of the Ten Thou.-yiml (3'.»9) 
Xinophnn (44.V.^r>4) 

Rome taken by the Gauls (390-389) 



E/mminonflaf (4 1 5-3r(2) 



B.c. 



Prehistoric Land» 



4 th century 



Bronto weapons and tools 



MoRahthic nionunipnts 



Asia 



EOTPT 



Palace of Firoui-Abad in Persia 



Hispano-Phœnician art 



The Hindoo scale 



Palace of Siirvistan in Persia 



Phoenician sarcophagi of Sidon 



3d century 



Jewelry — Goldsmith's art 
Industrial and intimais ■>" 

Portico of Nektanebo at Ph-.' 



Ptoi^maic Euptrx 



Stupu «>f S.iiichi in India 

ColuniiiH of A.Hoka in India 

Lir-Y, Chinese p. 

The greit wall of China (24«i> 



Temple of Dcbot 



Jewelry — CinldAmithV •*' 
Industrial and intioiatr- ■ 



Greece 



Agalharchus, p. and decorator 

discovers perspective 

Zeuzls, Â. p. 

ApoUodortu, A. p. 

PanhasioB, A. p. 

Eupompos, p. 

Cephiaodotuê, A. s. 

Soopas 

Bryaxis and Timotheos, A. se. 

of the Mausoleum of Halicar- 

nassus. A.M. (352) 

Apogee of the Tanagras 

J*amphUo8, Macedonian, p. 

Pythios, Ionian a. 



Theater of Dionysos (?) 

The Niobides 
Monument of Lysicratus (335) 
Temple of Priene, A.M. (334) 

Second temple of Ephesus. A.M. 

Leochares and Eupnranor, A. as. 



Demeter of Cnidus 

Temple of Lycosoura 

ApeUes (350-308), A. p. 

Silanion, s. 

Apollo of the Belvedere 

Nicia^. A. p. 

PraxltelM (360-280). A. s. 

Ariatoxenes of Tarentum (350-?) 

Philon, a. of the 

Portico of Eleusis (311) 



Lysippus, A. 8. 

Ilermogenes, a. of the temples of 

Magnesia and of Teos 
I^ausias, Prot4>oene8 and Action, 

Didjrmeion of Miletus, A.M. 
Venus, Psyche of Capua, M.G. 



Hbllenihtic Period 

(Asia Minor) 

(Islands, Alexandria. Cyrenaica) 

The Sarcophagus of Alexander, 

AM. 

Victory of Saniothrace 

Charts, s. 

Temple of Apollo at Delos 

Colossus of Uho<lo8 

Tiinormu'hns, p. 

Polycuiios, s. 

Kpigonoa, s. of Pergamum 

Terra cottas of Myrina, A.M. 
{Diphtlos, coroplast) 

The Dying Gladiator 



Roue 



History 



Etruscan tombs 



Etruscan tombs 



Fabiu3 Pictor, p. 
Appian Way (312) 



Sarcophagus of Scipio Barbatus 
(298) 



First silver coins (209) 



Rostral colunm of Duilius (260) 



Plato (429-348) 
Hegemony of Thebes 



Demosthenes (385-322)' 
AristoOe (384-322) 
Philip (359-336). Hegemony of Mace- 
donia (338) 

Menciwi (Meng-Tze) (?-314) 

Alexander (356-323) conquers Egypt 
and Asia Minor and penetrates 
into India 



Valmiki (?) The Ramayanft 
The Ptolemaic Empire (323) 



Zeno. Stoicism 



Founding of Alexandria (305) 



Etruscan tombe 



Manetho, Egyptian historian 

The Museum of Alexandria 

Euclid 

Rome subjects Etruria 



Epicurus (331-270) 

Pyrrhus against Rome (280-274) 

Rome becomes mistress of Italy (270) 

First Punic War (264-41) 

Aaoka, King of India (277-23). becomes 
a Buddhist 

Archimedes (287-212) 




Prehistoric Lands 



Bronze weapons and tools 



(?) 



2d century 



Ist century 



Prehistoric sculpture 
(stone) 
(Gaul, ^>|)ain) 

MfKulithic monuments 



Coins and bronzes of 
Gaul • 



Asia 



Sarcophagi, potteries, masks, 

and jewels of Carthage 

(Africa) 



EOTPT 



Temple of Isis at Pbilc 

Temple of Edfu 

(237-212—176-122) 



(India) 
Temple of Kandaiiri 
Greco-Buddhistic sculpture 
' Temple of Bhaja 
Chaitya of Karli (163) 
Temple of A junta 
>Stupa of Bharhut 
Bronze weapon» and tools I Bas-reliefs of Hiao-Tang-Chan 

in China 

Temple of Buddha-Gaya in 

India (?) 



The trilininial stone <rf RotfUi 
(196) 
Temple of Kom Ombo 
Temple of Hathor at Pkik 

Alezandm!: 



WcapcmB, coin», and 
bronzes of Gaul 



Hebrew sarcophagi 



Temple of Eane 



Sanctuary of Osiria at Karoi* 



AI^Eaodnt: 



Temple of Hatbor at DroO'' 



Roman kiosk of Phils (l« 



Uoniun temple of xxon» * 
Kalabche 



Restorations of textxpke* 



Grkecs 



The Sleeping Fury 

Jewelry — Goldsmith's art 
Intimate sculpture 



Cleomtnea, a. 



Alexandrian 



Seated pugilist of the Themue 
Damophon, s. 



T 



(Statues of Lycoeoura) 



irt 



Ingotws and Stratonicoa, ss. of 

Pergamum 

Altar of Pergamum. A.M. 

Theater of Delphi 

Timarchideê, PalykUê^ 
The Venus of Milo 
(Hageaandroa ?, s.) 

Cteaibioa invents the organ 

Eubotdidea, s. 

A ndranicoa CyrrheaUB, a. of the 
Tower of the Winds, Athens 

(School of RhodM) 

poUonioa of Trallea, s. of the 
Farneso Bull 



Agesandroa, s. of the Laocoon 

poUonioa. A. n. of the Hercules 

of the Belvedere 
•t 



(Roman School) 

PaaiUlta, s. 

The throne of Venus (?) 

Stephanos, s. 

Venus of the Esquiline (?) 



Olycon, 8. of the Famese 
Hercules 



Dioacuridea, moeaist, M.G. 



Amphitheater of Po 

Mcnelaoa and Archelaoa, ss. 
(Roman School) 



Rome 



Cist of Ficoroni 
{Novioa PUtiUiua, bronseworker) 

Flaminian Way (220) 



art 



Pacuvius (220-130). p. 

Aqua Marcia (146) 
Greek se. at Rome 



MtUiiUt a. 

Importations of Greek works 
at Rome 

Roman copip« of Greek works 
Aqueduct of Tarragona 

Coponiua, s. 
Titidrua Labeo and Arellius, pp. 

VUruviua, a. and critic 

The Aldobrandini wedding 

Tomb of Cecilia Metella 

The EdUity of Agrippa (33) 

The Palatine-House of Livia 

The Pantheon of Agrippa (26) 

{Vcderiua of Oatia, a.) 

Pont du Gard (19) 

Ludius, p. 

Theater of Marcellus (13) 

Pyramid of Cestius (12) 

Tomb of Vergilius Eur^'ares 

Kabr er Roumya, Numidian 

tomb in Algeria 

Sarcophagi 
Busts and statues 

Bridge of Rimini (14) 

«luoli (?). M.G. 

Arch of Triumph of Orange 

Amvbiua, p. 



HlSTORT 



Ptolemy III fixes the length of the year 
as 365H days (238) 



TheocriiM» 

Hannibal (247-183). Second Punic War 

(218-02) 
Rome subjects Magna Gnecia and 

SicUy (211) 



Plautua (250-184) 
Antiochua the Créai (222-186). Po 
of Antioch 

Philopœmen (233-183) 

Bnniua (240-160) 
Hippcurcua, astronomer 



Judaa Maccabeua (200-160) 

Invention of paper in China (?) 

Destruction of Carthage (147) 
Greece becomes a Ronutn province 
(146) 

Tiberiua and Caiua Graehua (133-121) 



Mariua defeats the Cimbri and the 
Teutons (102-101) 



SyUa (136-78) 

Lucretiua (08-55) 

Revolt ot the slaves at Rome — 

Spartacua (73) 
Lucidlua (100-57) against Mithridatea 
Cicero (106-43) 1(135-63) 



Caaar (100^14) conquers Gaul (51) 



VergU (70-10) 

Augit^v 
Empi 

J^orace (66-06) 



ua (63-1-14)— The Roman 
mpire (31) 



Titua Liviua (—50 + 10) 



Jeeus Christ (— O4-|-20) 



Philo the Jew (—30+54) 



Strabo 



CMp 



Prehistoric Lands 



let oentxiry 



2d century 



Asia 



BaH-rc'li(fH of ( )u-LeanK-TEe 
ill Chiiui 



Tsai-YonB, Chinese p. 



Ram 



Alexandra 



Necropolis of Ale'xamJn* 



Gate of Hadrian at Phils 



AlexaD 



Sarcophagus portraits 



GR££CE 



Theater of Taornii ua, M.G. 
Crouching Venuaes 
Venus of Arlee 



KOUE 



History 



art 



Alexan 



Theater of Saguntum (?), 8p. 
Mausoleum of Saint-Remy (?) 



Monuments of Hcrcula 



Sculptures, paintings, and ind 

of Pom 



Arttileajs, Papia», Grm'k ss. at 
Rome 



Apollodorus of Da 



Monument of Philopappoa 



Quintus Pediua, p. 
Art of the Catacomoe 

drian art 

Aqtia Claudia 

Turpilius, p. 

Pliny the Elder (23-79), critic 

Maison Carrée of Nîmes 

The Coliseum 

ncum and Pompeii, M.G. 

Arch of Titus 

ustrial art of Heroulaneum and 
peii, M.G. 

Arena of Pola 



Frontinua (40-103). engineer 

Arena of Aries 
Monuments of Cherchell, Af. 
Amphitheater of Saintes (?) 



Lacer, a. of the 
Bridge of Alcantara (105) 

mascus, Greek a. of Trajan 

Golden Gate of Pola 

Trajan's column (112) 

Gate of Benevento 

Bridge and monuments of Mérida 

Aqueduct of Segovia 

Bridge of Salamanca 



Monuments of Timgad. Af. 

Arch of Hadrian at Athens 

Temple of Baalbeck, A.M. 

Coaautius, Roman a. uf the Olympieion (134-35) 

Xoniua Datua, a. of the 
Aqueduct of Cherchell. Af. (137) 

Amphitheater of Treves 

Aqueduct and waterworks of 
, Zaghotian, Af. 

Alexan drian art 

Mole of Hadrian 

Theater of Orange 

Art of the Catacombs 

Arena of Nîmes 

Capitol of Dougga, Af. 



Greece pillaged by the Romans 
Seneca (2-65) 



Saint Paul at Athens (54) 



.Vm> (54-68). Burning of Rome (64) 
The Emperor Ming-Ti becomes a 
Buddhist (64) 



Taking of Jerusalem by the Romans 
(71) 

Destruction of Herculaneum and 
Pompeii (79) 

Joaephuê (37-?) 

Juvenal (42-?) 
Tacitua (55-117) 

Epictetua 

Trajan (98-117) 



Plutarch 



Hadrian (117-138) 



I 



Pauaaniaa visits Greece 



Lucian of Samoaata 
Ptolemy, astronomer 



Roman Embassy in China (166) 



PRKHISTORIC LàlTDS 



3d century 



4th century 



Asia 



Chaitya of Amravati in India 

Stupa of Sambrunath 
in India (Nepal) 



Tittio-fuu-hinff, Chine«e p. 



Bridges of Disfoul and of 
Chouster in Persia 

Bas-reliefs of Hapor at Nakch- 
e-Roustem 



Fortress of Gwalior in India 
Iron column of Delhi 



Buddhistic frescoes of Turk- 
estan 



First porcelain tower at 
Nnnkin (China) 



Kou-K'ai-Tche, Chinese p. 



Kgtpt 



SarcophoKUB portnit^ 



GlUEBCB 



Odeon of Her 



Alexan 



ROMB 

Arena of El Djem, Af. 

Column of Marcus Aurelius (180) 

od Atticua 

Monuments of Djerach, Af. 

Septizonium of Septimiiis 
Severus 

Arch of SeptimiuB Severua (203) 

Arch of Triumph 
of Lambeesa, Af. 

Arch and Temple of Tebeasa, f . 
(214) 
Theater of AspendoB (?) A.M. 

Art of the Catacombs 

Statues of the Vestals 

drian art 

Busts, statues, sarcophagi 

Colonnades of Palmyra. A.M. 

Walls of Aurelian at Rome (271) 

Temple of the Sun at 

Palmyra, A.M. (273) 

Arena of Verona (296) 
Palace of the Therms at Lutecc 
Column of Pompey at Alexandria 

(302) 

Thermœ of Diocletian at Spalato 

Arch of Constantino (315) 

Basilica of Constantino 

Arch of Janus Quadrifons (?) 

Gate of Treves (?) 



Church of Saint Paul outside the 
walls (386) 



History 



Mnrcu* Aureliu» (161-180) 



Kalidoêad). The Sakuntala (?) 



TertuUian (160-240) 



Plotinus (206-70) 



Aurelian (270-76) 



Conslantine (306-37). 
Christianity 

Byrantium (326) 



Triumph of 



Julian the ApoHaU (361-63) 

Saint Jerome (331-420) 

Theodoêiua the Great (378-06) destroys 

the pagan idols (383) 
St. John Chryeoatom (347-407) 

The Visigoths destroy Eleusis (306) 
End of tne Olympic games (306) 
HypaHa (370-416) 



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